IND$FILE

[jim stephens]

On 11/19/2018 7:49 AM, Jim Brain via cctalk wrote:
> I know it's a minor nit, but as someone who has used IND$FILE on 
> OS/390 (zOS), I always wondered why it was called IND$FILE. Wikipedia 
> has just a stub:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IND$FILE
>
> FILE I tend to understand, but I was never very knowledgeable of MVS, 
> so I'm not sure where IND comes from.
>
> Jim
>
>
I believe the package internal to mvs / OS has the preface of IND for 
the modules.  Similar to IFBR14 is part of the IFB suite of programs.

IFBR14 if you all are not familiar with MVS / MVT batch programming is a 
program which immediately terminates w/o any return codes by doing an 
assembly language return to the caller of the job step via the contents 
of R14 of the processor, which is also the return address.

If you needed to do a bunch of JCL but not really run a program to 
accomplish something, but the JCL or programming required a "program" to 
execute, IFBR14 was the program used to do that.

Anyway, I think from my foggy recollection that there are other IND 
something modules which comprise the full package of which IND$FILE is a 
part.

The module naming convention was frequently extended to the VM 
environment which is where I used it most frequently.   It was also used 
with SNA connections to transfer files as well (as a protocol) similar 
to the xmodem and the like protocols were used with async data transfers.

thanks
Jim