I had managed to mess up the files for a product, so I wanted to copy them across from an older system.

This worked for some of the files – but when I came to start the subsystem – it was missing some files! For example /u/my/zosmf/liberty/lib/native/zos/s390x/bbgzsrv

I copied the files across again – and they were still not there!

Once you know the answer it is obvious…

There is a directory /usr/lpp/zosmf/liberty – and it was this directory that was missing.

Once I looked into it more carefully – this was not a directory, but a symbolic link to another directory liberty -> ../liberty_zos/current

To fix this I used

# go to my version of zosmf
cd /u/my/zosmf
# remove the symbolic link
rm liberty
#make the new link
ln -s  /usr/lpp/liberty_zos/current     liberty   
    

and now I could use ls /u/tmp/zosmfp/liberty/lib/native/zos/s390x/bbgzsrv and it found the file.

If I had checked this before I started, I would have save myself a half day of IPLing older systems!