Qshell - Utilities

Background

A large number of utilities exist under Qshell which will make your live considerably easier. This write-up will help to highlight some of the hidden gems that exist under QShell.

Read or write record files - rfile

This Qshell utility reads record (database and device) files, and displays it to standard output, or reads information from standard input, and write the data to record files. See this link for the IBM explanation.

RFile Example - Alternative to CPYTOIMPF

If you have a plaintext file with a single field, that you want to copy to the IFS, the following will be easy to use:

rfile -rlQ LIBNAME/FILENAME > /tmp/filename.txt

This will not work correctly when displaying data for fields which has numeric or date values.