AS400 FAQs - COMMANDS

My server logs show that many people are coming to this site with general questions about AS400s, so I've added a few pages in which I discuss some of the topics people are searching for.

Useful AS400 Commands

Where to begin ? Useful for what ? You really need to be a bit more specific. Are you a developer or a systems administrator ? Well, let's just give you a very basic grounding in the commands themselves.
OS400, the operating system for the AS400, is one of the few server operating systems built from the ground up and not based on Unix. The database forms part of the operating system, and is always shipped with it, so there are many commands used to access the database as well as providing normal system operations tasks.
The commands themselves are designed to be "intuitive", and follow a standard naming convention. Indeed once you understand the principles of how the AS400 is organised, the commands are easily discernable. For example, any interactive of batch process is a JOB. So a user session is a JOB, the web services run as JOBs, and the system tasks run as JOBs. Each job has an associated number (and name but we won't get into that now). There are standard three letter acronyms for various tasks to perform on an object - eg a JOB is an object - and these have a standard 3 letter acronym.
For example, you can do the following actions on many different types of obejcts:

DSP - display
DLT - delete, generally for a static object
WRK - work with, ie manipulate
STR - start, usually a service or process
END - end a process

So, we can combine three letter acronyms to guess what we want to do. eg DSPJOB shows the operational parameters of a job, WRKJOB allows you to change the parameters, ENDJOB cancels a job, etc. If you wanted to see what active jobs are running on your system you would type DSPACTJOB or WRKACTJOB. To start a printer service on a remote writer you would type STRRMTWTR. So, like I say, once you get the hang of it then the commands do become more intuitive. Unlike bloody unix.

You are now strongly recommended to get your IBM CL command manual out to see what's available. There are hundreds of different types of objects on the AS400, in fact EVERYTHING on an AS400 is an object, so go check out what is achieveable.

This article was submitted by me, Vince Lewis. I hope that the hints and tips above prove useful to you

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