IBM Mainframe Forum

Hi,
How to notify an operator for no. of lines of a job output exceeding a specified limit.
for eg,
operator should be notified if the job output exceeds 50000 lines.
Thanks.

Hello,

Usually, a job will abend if the line limit is exceeded. If this does not happen talk with your system support people to provide this.

To notify the operator, call them and ask them to cancel the job.

Many systems allow someone to cancel their own jobs.

With /*JOBPARM JCL statement (JES2) you can set a LINES value to override the site limit but it probably just send a warning to the console and the operators would miss it.

For the sake of definition: The LINES parameter is an optional parameter on the JOB statement for use with ESA 4.2 and later releases. It indicates the maximum amount of output, in thousands of lines, to be printed for the job's sysout data sets. It can also be used to specify the action that the system is to take if the maximum is exceeded.

But if you say

Can we put in LINES=(999999,WARNING) and would the job still run fine if it exceeds 999,999,000 lines of ouput ?

Just don't do that unless you are serious about that your site support group should kill you and hid your body ....

Site limits are established after careful consideration of the ramifications and changing them may cause unexpected side effects. As for example, if you start writing millions of lines of output to the JES spool, sooner or later it fills up. When the JES spool fills up, JES stops submitting jobs and even worse, sometimes jobs stop running, until the spool free space hits a certain percentage. Spool space is also needed to sign onto TSO so nobody can get into TSO until spool space is freed up ... and so on..so forth... beware.

There is a site-specific limit above which, messages will appear on the console.
If your operators are on the ball, they WILL call you, or cancel the job for you, if they can't contact you.
Guaranteed. I do it every day.