OMVS is the way ahead!

If you have any suggestions in this area – please let me know!

With lots of development of open source tools for OMVS on z/OS, I thought I would try it out. I’ve been amazed at how good it is. This blog post is “one liners” to help people get started and over the initial hump to moving towards this. I’ll add more blog posts as I go further down the path.

My original task was to develop some Python scripts to extract profiles from RACF. I use Ubuntu Linux on my laptop.

I used to use OMVS from ISPF, because I thought the interface through SSH was poor in comparison. I now think that the OMVS interace is limited compare to the SSH interface, because of all of the enhancements and packages available to it.

One example is I use the “less” command on Linux very frequently. This does not work with ISPF OMVS, but it is available through SSH.

See Setting Up the z/OS UNIX Shell (Correctly & Completely) for an excellent article on moving to OMVS though SSH.

Editing is easy

• Create a mountpoint on your laptop.
• use sshfs colin@10.1.1.2: ~/mountpoint
• use vscode to edit the files. This is a very popular editor/IDE.
• you have to be careful of tagging the file. Create a file using touch, then use “chtag -t -c ISO8859-1 filename “, and then edit it. It is editable in vscode and ISPF (but not at the same time of course). Yesterday the files needed the tag ISO8859-1, today they only work without the tag! ( chtag -r newtry.py) – I do not know what has changed!

I used other tools such as diff, from my laptop to files in my z/OS Home directory.

You can install packages like zowe on z/OS and use vscode to edit files and datasets from lists, to issue z/OS commands, and look at spool. This is a heavy weight package, but is very popular. The editing via sshfs is very easy.

Install zopen

zopen is a set of packages ported from open source. It was easy to install.

I used zopen install … to install packages. I used

• zopen install which, this tells you the full path of a command
• zopen install less, less is a fast display of a file in a terminal, with search capability. It is often faster than an editor/browser. Less is a more advanced version of the more command. The more command allows you to page through a file.

Use the bash or zsh shell

In my OMVS userid profile I set PROGRAM(/u/zopen/usr/local/bin/bash) This version of bash has proper key support. For example delete really does delete characters. For the Rocket port of bash the delete key is a dead key.

If your delete key does not work on the command line

Use the zopen bash shell, PROGRAM(/u/zopen/usr/local/bin/bash) or the zsh shell PROGRAM(/bin/zsh).

Logon

Use a command like ssh colin@10.1.1.2 to get to z/OS. You can configure SSH and transfer a key file to z/OS, so you can logon without a password.

Using the right shell

The default borne shell is so back level. You should use bash or zsh.

bash

You should use bash from zopen. Use PROGRAM(/u/zopen/usr/local/bin/bash) in your RACF profile. Use bash from zopen because this has more function than Rocket’s bash – and the delete key works as expected.

zsh

Many people recommend zsh. Use program(/bin/zsh) in your RACF profile to use it. See Oh My Zsh or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Shell to a good introduction to zsh extensions. For example there are sudo, and a git interface.

Issuing TSO commands

You can use the tsocmd to issue a command and get a response back

tso "LU COLIN" |less

you can then page through the output

Command complete

Bash and zsh have command completion.
if you type zopen [tab] [tab] it will display the options available for the zopen command

You can use ls [tab] [tab] to display all the files in the current directory

RACF

I’ve been using the Python interface (pysear) to RACF to display information, and manage profiles. It’s great and very flexible.

SDSF

There is a python interface to sdsf, available in z/OS 3.1, but it is not available in the 3.1 images I have.

My ~/.profile

export _BPXK_AUTOCVT=ON
export _CEE_RUNOPTS="FILETAG(AUTOCVT,AUTOTAG) POSIX(ON)"
export _TAG_REDIR_ERR=txt
export _TAG_REDIR_IN=txt
export _TAG_REDIR_OUT=txt
export CXX="/bin/xlclang++"
export CC="/bin/xlC"
export CC="/bin/xlclang++"
export PATH=${PATH}:/bin
export PATH=${PATH}:/u/colin/.local/bin
export PATH=${PATH}:/u/tmp/zowep/bin/
export PATH=${PATH}:/usr/lpp/IBM/cyp/v3r12/pyz/bin
export LIBPATH=${LIBPATH}:/usr/lpp/IBM/cyp/v3r12/pyz/lib
. /u/zopen//etc/zopen-config --override-zos-tools
# if Ive come in from SSH....
if [[ -z "$SSH_CLIENT"  ]]
   then
     # dummy
     xxx="$SSH_CLIENT"
   else
     set -x
     zopenkw="alt audit build clean compare-versions compute-builddeps  \
      config-helper create-cicd-job create-repo diagnostics  \
      generate help2man info init install md2man migrate-buildenv \
      migrate-groovy promote publish query remove split-patch     \
      Cupdate-cacert usage version whichproject "
     echo $kw
     complete -W "$zopenkw "  zopen
 fi

That’s as far as I’ve got.