John Fisher's Wonderful VMARC Utility

Years ago, John Fisher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute wrote the canonical CMS file-packaging utility, VMARC. Since that time, there have been some changes needed, so around 1998 I took up support and did some Y2K work (although VMARC was largely Y2K-safe and had always been so, there were a few rough edges). Anyway, here's what I've got to share.

"Recent" Updates To VMARC

The following updates have been issued "recently" (i.e. since I took over maintenance in 1998). They apply on top of VMARC ASSEMBLE and all the prior updates (V1R2P002 through V1R2P020).

• Update VMARC V1R2P028, to support VM/370 R6 (for Hercules et al.), courtesy of Peter J. Farley III pjfarley3@yahoo.com. Released 2002-05-14.
• Update VMARC V1R2P027, to tolerate RECFM=V archives for input. Released 2000-08-21.
• Update VMARC V1R2P026, to ignore SFS zero-record files in VMARC PACK. Released 2000-08-21.
• Update VMARC V1R2P025, allows assembly against MACLIBs from older levels of CMS. Released 1999-09-29.
• Update VMARC V1R2P024, fixes an obscure error in the source involving interrupt masking. The object code always actually worked, but only by luck. Released 1999-09-29.
• Update VMARC V1R2P023, documents the long-existing ASKREPLACE, PROMPT and NEWREPLACE options. Released 1999-09-28.
• Update VMARC V1R2P022, corrects an input-file-reading problem that may occur running VMARC repeatedly under control of CMS Pipelines. Released 1999-09-28.
• Update VMARC V1R2P021, changes to fully support Y2K. Released 1998-09-23.
• An updated VMARC AUXUPD file with all updates including the above.

The Whole Kit And Kaboodle

• The entire VMARC VMARC package, containing all the source and all updates (including the "recent updates" listed above), and a compiled and linked MODULE. Download as text and then do the following to unpack:
  1. Issue the "PIPE < VMARC TXT | 64DECODE | FBLOCK 80 | > VMARC VMARC A F 80" command to reconstruct the VMARC file from the text file you downloaded.
  2. Issue the "VMARC UNPK VMARC VMARC A * * output_filemode" command to extract all the source files from the VMARC file to the minidisk or SFS directory where you want to store them.

A Few Other Things You Might Need Or Want

• Melinda Varian's 64ENCODE and 64DECODE CMS Pipelines stages (the latter used above) in case you don't already have them.
• It's possible you've never had a copy of VMARC on your VM system before. If that's the case, you need something to unpack the VMARC VMARC file above. That "something" is a pre-compiled VMARC MODULE, stored as a packed-and-BASE64-encoded text file. Download it as a text file (it's in ASCII), get it to your CMS system however you usually do that (translating it to EBCDIC in the process) and then do the following to unpack it:
  • "PIPE < VMARCMOD TXT | 64DECODE | FBLOCK 1024 | UNPACK | > VMARC MODULE A"
  After that, you can unpack the VMARC VMARC file as described above.
• Bill Godfrey's unpack-only port of VMARC 1.2.13 to MVS (i.e.VMARC base plus updates through V1R2P013).
• Richard Ross' QVMARC fullscreen broswer for VMARC archives. (from NOTE QVMARC on VMSHARE). Stored as a BASE64-encoded VMARC file, just like "The Whole Kit And Kaboodle" above, so use the same techniques to unpack it.
• For those of you running VM/370 on Hercules or something similar (wow, talk about "Back to the Future"!), here's a pre-compiled VMARC370 MODULE, stored as a DISK DUMP file and packed in a ZIP file so you can get it through the non-VM systems intact. Download it in binary and use your favorite ZIP tool to extract "vmarc370.diskdump", then stick it in your Hercules reader directory. The file will appear in your VM SPOOL in MAINT's reader queue, where you can simply "DISK LOAD" to create VMARC370 MODULE on your A-disk. Many thanks to Peter J. Farley III pjfarley3@yahoo.com for putting this together.
• Leland Lucius's VMA and VMAgui read-only tools for listing and extracting files from VMARC archives. These tools run on a variety of platforms, including Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows systems, and Linux on both IBM mainframes and Intel x86.

Ross Patterson
RossPatterson@Yahoo.Com

Back to the home page, Jeeves!