IBM Mainframe Forum

SORT TERMINATED DUE TO NON-ZERO RETURN CODE - 16

Any ideas anybody ? The manual helpfully informs me that "SORT did not run successfully", thanks a bunch !

Thanks guys.

I expect the SYSOUT messages from the sort step would have ample information as to the error.

Hello and welcome to the forum,

When starting a topic, it is never a good idea to post "it didn't work". There is always more diagnostic info available somewhere and in order for someone to help, you need to provide that info.

Hello,

Is this now working? If not and you provide some details we may be able to make suggestions.

If it is working, posting the solution may help someone at a later tijme. . .

hi..
i m getting following error when trying to sort in the easytrieve program:
SORT TERMINATED DUE TO NON-ZERO RETURN CODE - 20

any ideas??

Hello and welcome to the forum.

any ideas??

None.

For us to be able to help, you need to post some usable info.

There is most likely other diagnostic info somewhere in the output. There are also most likely informatoinal messages from the sort. You need to post these along with the message ids.

I got the same issue for one of my easytrieve program.

you might find following line in your JCL LOG
+ICE158A 0 CNAXBSTU.CLDHSTU SYSOUT DD STATEMENT MISSING

if you look for ICE158A in QW you will find following details:
ICE158A SYSOUT DD STATEMENT MISSING

Explanation: Critical. Issued only to the master console to indicate
that ICEMAC option NOMSGDD=QUIT was used and a message data set was
required, but not specified. Corresponds to DFSORT return code 20.

System Action: The program terminates.

Programmer Response: Specify a DD statement for the message data set,
using the ddname specified by MSGDDN (if any) or SYSOUT.

my problem being a missed outstatment in my JCL step
try this out...it might as well work for you.

One thing i didnt understand is that this problem is not consistent. The same job has run so many times in past without this missing sysout problem and now suddenly why did missing DD starts popping up???

Any words of wisdom will be highly appreciated...

Hello,

Most likely because something has changed and now the DD statement is needed.

or

Something caused the DD to be removed from the jcl. Someone thought they'd get rid of unneeded DD statements?

I am not sure about removal of DD statments but i did hear some one say that Easytrieve version was upgraded at our shop some time back. May be this issue in with that.

Thank you for your help,
Anjali