In this issue, I will present the Remove Pending Job Log (RMVPNDJOBL) command, which allows you to easily perform a manual or scheduled cleanup of pending job logs. To illustrate the circumstances that make the RMVPNDJOBL command useful, I’ve gathered information from IBM’s documentation of the release 5.4 introduction of the QLOGOUTPUT system value and the LOGOUTPUT job description and job attribute.
As of release 5.4, job logs are brought into the “on demand” world. The job logs are available when needed, but no work is done to produce job logs for which there is no need. Here’s the story about how the different components act together.
A job’s LOG parameter has three elements: the message (or logging) level, the message severity, and the level of message text. Each of these elements have specific values that, when combined, determine the amount and type of information sent to the job log by the job.
For example, the *NOLIST value of the Text element causes no job log to be produced if the job ends normally. (The job log does not go into pending.) If the job ends abnormally (if the job end code is 20 or higher), a job log is produced. The messages that appear in the job log contain both the message text and the message help.
You can control what produces the job log. This is done with the job LOGOUTPUT parameter. When a job completes, one of three actions occur that affects how the job log is created.
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