IBM Mainframe Forum

Hi,

Can anyone please help me understand the use of the utility IEBPTPCH. upon a little research I learnt that this utility is used to Print and Punch. I am not aware what does 'Punch' mean.

Thanks,
Suneel

First, what the manual says:

Each printed line consists of groups of eight characters separated by two blanks. Up to 96 data characters can be included on a printed line. Each punched card contains up to 80 contiguous bytes of information.

I like to think of PRINTED output as, well, the same as output you'd send to a printer, with formatting, spacing, carriage control, page breaks, etc. I like to think of PUNCHED output as just the raw data, free from any special formatting or other attributes.

Back in the days before 3270 terminals (which in turn was years before the PC came along), the primary way to get data into a mainframe was punched card. Punched cards had holes in them to represent data and each card had 12 rows (0 to 9, A, and B) and 80 columns where holes could be punched. IEBPTPCH was used to punch data (and programs) into punched cards for later use, along with printing data to a printer.