September 23, 2016
TechTip: An Easier Way to Search Through Massive Job Logs
Cilasoft offers its new Job Log Explorer tool to the IBM i community at no cost.
Written by Guy Marmorat
Anyone who has searched through mountains of pages in job logs to find specific program messages during the process of troubleshooting knows all too well how time-consuming and tedious this task can be. In fact, as my team and I have worked with customers and partners over the years, we’ve commonly heard complaints about this very thing. But what’s surprising is there hasn’t been a useful tool available (at least that we could find) to help quickly isolate critical job information in these ungainly job logs. It’s basically a process of repeatedly pressing the F16 (Shift+F4) search key while trying various search terms.
TechTip: Edit Files in the IFS 2
Editing files in the IFS has been a hot topic since COMMON Spring 2016. I wanted to share how I currently do it.
Written by Aaron Bartell
With PASE becoming more and more popular via open-source languages, it makes sense that there are more and more ways to edit code in the IFS. For example, you could use the dinosaur EDTF 5250 command, which is fairly rudimentary but can do the job in a pinch (hey, I still use it sometimes). A next step up is the Joe editor, which can be used from an SSH session and actually works decently—yet another editor I use in a pinch. I've also used RPGNextGen.com's editor for IFS files, and that has worked, though it lacked syntax coloring. And of course I'd be remiss if I didn't mention RDi and its ability to easily navigate and edit IFS files. But as we all know, RDi comes at a premium and still doesn't run on Mac (which is what I use).