10. How to migrate JCL scripts

10.1 First convert the scripts to plain text

In order to work with JCL scripts from MVS, they must first be converted into simple ASCII (or ISO 8859-1) text files with no special formatting in them. That means no packing, no formating control characters (except linefeeds), and no line numbers. The PKZIP program is normally capable of doing this conversion (if it is told to do so ***?). When PKZIPping a directory of text files, specify the -TEXT (***?) option and the conversion will be done. FTP the zipped archive from MVS to Unix (do not forget to set the transfer type to binary), and unpack with unzip(1).

Verify that there is no strange formatting in the script files. Use cat(1) or more(1) to quickly dump the file to the terminal. Use xedit(1) to see if there are any strange embedded characters (like extra carriage returns, often symbolised with "^M").

If there is any strangeness, you might be able to fix it by passing the scripts through the trimspace filter that was written for this job. To get rid of strangeness, type:

$ trimspace filename

The JCL script file should be perfect now.

10.2 Conversion of the JCL script with jcl2perl translator

Invoke jcl2perl on each JCL file, like so:

$ jcl2perl BULAJOUR

The translator might print some error messages, warnings, or notes. If you find the messages annoying and you are already certain that the translation will be correct, simply divert standard error output to the "bit bucket" /dev/null like so:

$ jcl2perl BULAJOUR 2>/dev/null

A file with the same name as the input file except with a .pl suffix added to it will be created. This new file (in the above example BULAJOUR.pl) is an executable Perl script. To run it, simple type it's name:

$ BULAJOUR.pl

...and it should run.

10.3 Changing job parameters

If there is ever a need to change job parameters, there are two ways that one can do it. If you are more comfortable with JCL, you can just change the JCL file and run the translator on it again. If you like Perl, you can change the script that was generated by the translator.

If the job was originally a job to run SAS and you like SAS, you might consider doing everything in SAS. All of the SAS OPTIONs can be set from within SAS programs, for example, and do not need to be specified on the command line.