IBM Mainframe Forum

Hi,

I have the Idea about FB (Fixed Block) and F (Fixed) but i have no awareness of FBA? Can you explain the difference?

Hello,

FBA contains "printer spacing" or "carriage control" info - which you can read about in the JCL reference manual.

To expand upon Mr. Scherrer's post. The carriage control character is in the first byte of each logical record. The common ones are 1, to start a new page, blank to start a new line, 0 to insert a blank line before printing the current line, - to insert two blank lines, and + to overprint the current line with the new line. With the advent of page oriented printers (laser printers), + has fallen into disuse because it produces unpredictable results.

There are other carriage control characters, but they are very rarely used since they require special carriage control "tapes" for very old line printers or carriage control images for newer printers. If the correct carriage control information was not available to the printer the use of these carriage controls caused extremely undesirable results at the printer, especially in older printers that used carriage control "tapes." Technically 1 requires a carriage control tape or image, but this is almost always provided.

Further expanding -

The A stands for ANSI (American National Standards Institute).

Also, in TSO, try this: browse and then view or edit an FBA dataset. For each see what columns are initially displayed. I think they'll be different. The browse will not show col1 but will say col1-80. The view/edit will actually show the ANSI char column.

ISPF browse will display the carriage control character if you enter DISPLAY CC in the command area and press your Enter key. DISPLAY CC is a retained attribute; once entered ISPF will continue to display it for other data sets with carriage control characters until you turn it off by entering DISPLAY NOCC.

SDSF does not normally display carriage control characters, though it will display them if you press the F10 key, or your scroll left key, if it is not F10 .