How to set record length in cURL? - dataset

I want to transfer a test file to mainframe, but the test file has lines exceeding 80 characters, which is default for FTP. Because the created dataset has record length 80, I am getting
451-File transfer failed. File contains records that are longer than the LRECL of the new file.
error. I tried this;
curl --ftp-ssl -k -v -B -T BBBBB -u USERNAME:PASS ftp://HOST_NAME:PORT/'DATASET_NAME(BBBBB)'
To solve this problem, I added -Q "site lrecl=250" but this didn' t help.

Are you creating a dataset or are creating a Member in a PDS ???. The syntax DATASET_NAME(BBBBB) implies you could be creating a member in an existing PDS.
The LRECL characteristics are defined in the PDS definition and can not be changed by the send command.
If it is an existing PDS, you will need to create a new dataset / PDS either through the send command or be creating a new dataset on the Mainframe with the correct characteristics and then doing the send.

Pre-allocate, on the Mainframe, a dataset with the characteristics that you want, like the LRECL (record-length) and RECFM (record format, are all the records a "fixed" length, or can they differ?).
If you ftp to that dataset, does that give you a problem?
I don't think that 80 is a "default" value for ftp, it is likely just the LRECL of the dataset you are trying to stuff the data into.
Somewhere amongst the Mainframe Support staff are people who know the standards for your Mainframe's ftp usage. It would be worth locating them, explaining what you have and what you need to do, and ask them the correct way to do it. Better than struggling away now, then have it "bounced" along the way as being "non-standard".

If this is a one-time or seldom repeated task, you could transfer the file to the Unix file system and then use OGET to create the "classic" z/OS file.

Related

SQL Server: copy headers after bat to extract data

I have many files that are extracted into .txt with a batch file. But they don't have the headers. I've read that a possible solution from here that is to add to a .txt with the headers the exported rows.
With this:
echo. >> titles.txt
type data.txt >> titles.txt
This takes a lot of time and is not efficient, since it is adding the big file to the file with the text.
Another possible solution is to add to the SQL query the titles hardcoded, but this will change the type of the columns (is they are numeric they will be changed to varchar).
Is there a way to insert in the first row of the data txt the headers and not doing vice-versa?
I might be wrong, but as far as I am informed (and as far as I know from earlier experiments in doing as described): No, it is not possible! The mentioned Tasks are acting on the file sequentially. You can either open a file for reading, writing or appending. If you open the titles.txt file for writing, it is overwritten - and with this empty. If you open it for appending, it can only append to the end of the file - so you can only write the data after the Header... the only way it might work - but which is pretty nasty - is to append the title to the end of the file and during later processing (e.g. xls or whatever) Resort the rows and put the last one to the beginning. But as mentioned: nasty and not really the way to go.
If the number of files to process is a bigger problem than any individual file size, switching from bcp to sqlcmd might help.

Following multiple log files efficiently

I'm intending to create a programme that can permanently follow a large dynamic set of log files to copy their entries over to a database for easier near-realtime statistics. The log files are written by diverse daemons and applications, but the format of them is known so they can be parsed. Some of the daemons write logs into one file per day, like Apache's cronolog that creates files like access.20100928. Those files appear with each new day and may disappear when they're gzipped away the next day.
The target platform is an Ubuntu Server, 64 bit.
What would be the best approach to efficiently reading those log files?
I could think of scripting languages like PHP that either open the files theirselves and read new data or use system tools like tail -f to follow the logs, or other runtimes like Mono. Bash shell scripts probably aren't so well suited for parsing the log lines and inserting them to a database server (MySQL), not to mention an easy configuration of my app.
If my programme will read the log files, I'd think it should stat() the file once in a second or so to get its size and open the file when it's grown. After reading the file (which should hopefully only return complete lines) it could call tell() to get the current position and next time directly seek() to the saved position to continue reading. (These are C function names, but actually I wouldn't want to do that in C. And Mono/.NET or PHP offer similar functions as well.)
Is that constant stat()ing of the files and subsequent opening and closing a problem? How would tail -f do that? Can I keep the files open and be notified about new data with something like select()? Or does it always return at the end of the file?
In case I'm blocked in some kind of select() or external tail, I'd need to interrupt that every 1, 2 minutes to scan for new or deleted files that shall (no longer) be followed. Resuming with tail -f then is probably not very reliable. That should work better with my own saved file positions.
Could I use some kind of inotify (file system notification) for that?
If you want to know how tail -f works, why not look at the source? In a nutshell, you don't need to periodically interrupt or constantly stat() to scan for changes to files or directories. That's what inotify does.

A simple log file format

I'm not sure if it was asked, but I couldn't find anything like this.
My program uses a simple .txt file for log purposes, It just creates/opens a file and appends lines.
After some time, I started to log quite a lot of activities, so the file became too large and hardly readable. I know, that it's not write way to do this, but I simply need to have a readable file.
So I thought maybe there's a simple file format for log files and a soft to view it or if you'd have any other suggestions on this question?
Thanks for help in advance.
UPDATE:
It's access 97 application. I'm logging some activities like Form Loading, SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE to MS SQL Server ...
The log file isn't really big, I just write the duration of operations, so I need a simple way to do this.
The Log file is created on a user's machine. It's used for monitoring purposes logging some activities' durations.
Is there a way of viewing that kind of simple Log file highlighted with an existing tool?
Simply, I'd like to:
1) Write smth like "'CurrentTime' 'ActivityName' 'Duration in milliseconds' " (maybe some additional information like query string) into a file.
2) Open it with a tool and view it highlighted or somehow more readable.
ANSWER: I've found a nice tool to do all I've wanted. Check my answer.
LogExpert
The 3 W's :
When, what and where.
For viewing something like multitail ("tail on steroids") http://www.vanheusden.com/multitail/
or for pure ms windows try mtail http://ophilipp.free.fr/op_tail.htm
And to keep your files readable, you might want to start new files when if the filesize of the current log file is over certain limit. Example:
activity0.log (1 mb)
activity1.log (1 mb)
activity2.log (1 mb)
activity3.log (1 mb)
activity4.log (205 bytes)
A fairly standard way to deal with logging from an application into a plain text file is to:
split the logs into different program functional areas.
rotate the logs on a daily/weekly basis (i.e. split the log on a size or date basis)
so the current log is "mylog.log" or whatever, and yesterday's was "mylog.log.1" or "mylog.ddmmyyyy.log"
This keeps the size of the active log manageable. And then you can just have expiry rules so that old logs get thrown away on a regular basis.
In addition it would be a good idea to have different log levels for your application (info/warning/error/fatal) so that you're not logging more than is necessary.
First, check you're only logging things that are useful.
If it's all useful, make sure it is easily parsable by tools such as grep, that way you can find the info you want. Make sure you have the type of log entry, the date/time all conforming to a layout.
Build yourself a few scripts to extract the information for you.
Alternatively, use separate log files for different types of entries.
Basically you better just split logs according to severity. You'll rarely need to read all logs for the whole system. For example apache allows to configure error log and access log, pretty obvious what info exactly they have.
If you're under linux system grep is your best tool to search through logs for specific entries.
Look at popular logfiles like /var/log/syslog on Unix to get ideas:
MMM DD HH:MM:SS hostname process[pid]: message
Example out of my syslog:
May 11 12:58:39 raphaelm anacron[1086]: Normal exit (1 job run)
But to give you the perfect answer we'd need more information about what you are logging, how much and how you want to read the logs.
If only the size of the log file is the problem, I recommend using logrotate or something similar. logrotate watches log files and, depending on how you configured it, after a given time or when the log file exceeds a given size, it moves the log file to an archive directory and optionally compresses it. Then the original log file is truncated. For example, you could configure it to archive the log file every 24 hours or whenever the files size exceeds 500kb.
If this is a program, you might investigate apache logging libraries (http://logging.apache.org/) Out of the box, they'll give you a decent logging format out of the box. They're also customizable, so you can simplify your parsing job.
If this is a script, see some of the other answers.
LogExpert
I've found it here. Filter is better, than in mtail. There's an option of highlighting just adding a string and the app is nice and readable. You can customize columns as you like.

how to open .d01 foxpro file

I am building a basic POS app for my cousin's pharmacy store so that he can dump the software he is currently using and save on license cost.All the medicines name which he has painfully entered into the software have been stored in a file with .d01 extension.
What i want is a way to read the contents of the .d01 file programmatically so that i can import the name of the medicines into my app.
The s/w from which my cousin uses is built in Foxpro(coz i see a lot of .cdx,.idx,.dbf files) and the file which i want to import is with .d01 extension. when i open the file in notepad it is something like this
http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/5528/foxpro.jpg
So I assume its somekind of database table or something. So can anyone please help me in reading this file, as i am not at all aware of foxpro.
Thanks a lot in advance to all those who take out time to reply.
hey guys thank you very much for replying so promptly.. I tried the solution suggested by Otávio and it worked, i will now write a small utility to read the dbf.
It has a good chance of being just a regular .dbf file. Copy it somewhere safe, change the extension to dbf and see if you can open it from foxpro.
Although it may have .cdx files, the actual paste of the file does not appear to be a visually recognizable header format of a VFP table... even if part of a database container. The characters around each column name don't look right. It may be from another language that also utilized "Compound Indexes". I even saw an article about Sybase's IAnywhere too. If worst-case scenario, and it is determined to be a possible fixed-length per row and no dynamic column sizes, you might take the file, strip off what appears to be the header and leave just the data and stream read it in based on how many constant characters are determined for the length. yeah, brute force, but just an option. Again, it doesn't LOOK like a VFP table.
BTW, what is the name of the software he is using... I'd look into that to see if any other type of indication to its source.
It looks sort of like a DBF file - maybe Clipper or something.

TBC files from an old and unknown database system

I have a bunch of *.TBC files from a very old application that runs in MS-DOS called TURBOLAB. Anyone know which DB System use files with a TBC extension.
I've tried renaming the files to *.dbf to check if they are dBase files with no luck.
Any idea?
Judging by the application and era (old MS-DOS) *.tbc is probably a fixed length binary record format written by the application's developers.
Try opening up the file in a text editor like TextPad first and if you can read the contents, if so I have a fixed length text file reader that you can adapt to your needs. If you cannot you may need to determine field lengths and data types through trial and error.
Also, are there associated files for each *.tbc? A paired file could indicate field lengths and data types (or that information could be stored at the top of a *.tbc file itself).
I Googled this: FlexPro. I hope it helps. Sounds pricey, I hope your data is worth it.
Judging by the application and era
(old MS-DOS) *.tbc is probably a fixed
length binary record format written by
the application's developers.
I think you are right. Unfortunately there are no matching file names. If each of those files is a 'table', there are like ~150 tables in this database. Too much work for such an old app. I guess my customer will have to start from scratch using my app.
Thanks anyway for your help.

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