IBM Mainframe Forum

Hi,

I have recently discovered that I can use repeated semi-colons to emulate an ENTER key depression (sometimes, maybe all times). Likewise, I can assign to a PFKEY.

For example, if I know that the dsname in 3.4 is already set to the right high level qual, I can type any of these:

and bypass the input panel. This also works if assigned to a PFKEY.

It also works after the START command, eg:

- apart from with START it needs to be ";;;" (3 semi-colons), with only 2 it leaves me on the input panel.

Question
Does anyone know the rules for this behaviour or where I can find it in a reference manual? Is it intentional behaviour or an undocumented feature?

Incidentally, if anyone uses BETA92 and finds that it 'loses' the next command after a semi-colon, eg. at our installation, from our main menu we type B92, so to get straight through to the job-selection panel, option 1, you would expect the following to work:

but it doesn't. However if you use 2 semi-colons, it does pass the command through and put you straight onto the job-select panel:


This same behaviour is consistent across much (all?) Beta92, if you want to setup your PFKEYS to process multiple commands at once in Beta92, separate commands with 2x semi-colons between commands and not just 1.

(And yes, playing around with my pfkeys in Beta92 was how I discovered the ENTER key simulation behaviour - unintentionally, I got it to display the job-select panel but, without my interaction, process the input panel and take me back to the job list, as though I had pressed ENTER.)

Thanks all.

using semi-colons to enter a sequence of commands/choices is documented
by logic entering a <blank> command/choice implies that only the enter key is pressed

intentional/undocumented ... only the ISPF developers can tell