IBM Mainframe Forum

Hello everyone,

I want to check the date of a file stored in tape, so I place / and choose 7 to view info of the file.

but it show me "Tape not supported".

please help me.

Thanks!

Use your site's tape management system!

prino wrote:Use your site's tape management system!

Thank you very much prino. May I ask where I can locate tape management system?

You need to talk to your site support group. Since a tape cannot be mounted via a TSO session, as you have found, attempting to access a tape via ISPF will give you an error message. It is not required that a site have a tape management system, but almost all sites do. How to access it requires contacting the site support group since there are different tape management systems available (such as Zara, DFSMSrmm, CA-1 to name three), each with different access requirements, and your site support group determines whether to place the access information on the main ISPF panel, or a subsidiary ISPF panel, or even directly through VTAM. We cannot help you with this since we do not work for your site and have no idea how things are structured there. Only someone working AT YOUR SITE can possibly help you.

Thank you very much.

you can copy data's tape to a sequencial file then see this.

If you want a example I can post here.

These users thanked the author edipoliveira for the post:

GeorgeQ (Fri Sep 01, 2017 9:33 pm)

edipoliveira, exactly how does your "solution" provide what was asked for? The person wants to know the "date of a file stored on tape" which presumably means the creation date although that was not specified. By copying the data to a sequential file (first fallacy: on a mainframe, files exist on tape and in Unix System Services ONLY -- all else are data sets), how are you providing the creation date of the tape file? The second fallacy you have is saying to copy to a "sequencial file" (sic) again, data set not file -- anything on a tape is sequential (the correct spelling) anyway! So your "solution" does not answer the original question, and is at best misleading since the data is already stored in a sequential file (namely, a file on a tape).

These users thanked the author Robert Sample for the post:

GeorgeQ (Fri Sep 01, 2017 9:33 pm)

As suggested, your site's tape management system is the best option, but if all you want is the date created, you can do an IDCAMS LISTCAT to get that:

Mr. Heinze appears to be showing part of the output of a LISTCAT command. This can be useful, but the creation date (2017.234) is the creation date of the catalog entry; it may not be the creation date of the data set on the tape. The information stored in the tape management system's catalog is usually more accurate, but it still may not accurately reflect the creation date stored in the data set label on the tape. Only specialized programs can retrieve this information reliably. No ordinary program can access this information.

There is at least one program in the CBT collection (http://www.cbttape.org) you can use. Search for TAPEMAP. If you have SAS, there is a prewritten proc that is part of SAS you can use. Look for tape map in your SAS documentation. Both the CBT program and SAS require you to be able to access the tape using BLP (Bypass Label Processing). BLP skips the rudimentary security processing for tapes and requires two different types of security authorizations to proceed. Your site security should be able to assist you with that.

a tape cannot be mounted via a TSO session

Is not entirely accurate. You can if you are authorized for it, which most people typically are not. You might have DITTO installed, which have an option 12 'Tape specific functions'.
But in my opinion tape access should be done in batch. And the TAPEMAP program that steve-myers mentioned is a very good tool.