Restart and cleanup

This chapter describes the restart and cleanup of jobs and started tasks running on z/OS environments. Unless otherwise stated, the description applies to both jobs and started tasks.

Restart and cleanup are basically two tasks:

Restarting an operation at the job-level or the step-level
Cleaning up the associated data sets

When you restart an operation at step-level, you select a step range: the starting step, the ending step, and any steps to exclude from the re-run. When you perform a cleanup, you take previously allocated data sets and either catalog, uncatalog, or delete them. These tasks can be completed separately or together depending on your preference and Data Processing needs. For example, you can specify the step restart and cleanup of an operation, which are completed at job run time. In other situations, you can run the data set cleanup process separately, before the job reruns. In the second case, the step restart only begins after the cleanup completes.

The OPERATION RESTART AND CLEANUP panel (see EQQRCLSE - Operation restart and cleanup) is displayed when you request the RC row command for any operation, which ran at least once, from any of the following operation lists in the MODIFY CURRENT PLAN panel:

Ended-in-error operation list
Operation list
Operation displayed when you request to rerun an occurrence

Figure 1. EQQRCLSE - Operation restart and cleanup

 EQQRCLSE --------------- OPERATION RESTART AND CLEANUP -----------------------
 Option ===>                                                                   
                                                                               
 Application           : APLICSIMONA  01/02/05 19.19                           
 Operation             : CPU1 10                                               
 Jobname and jobid     : JOBSAMP JOB00163                                      
 Expanded JCL          : N                                                     
                                                                               
                                                                               
 cleanup Result       :                                                       
                                                                               
                                                                               
 Edit JCL        ===> Y            Edit JCL before Restart (SR/JR only)        
                                                                               
                                                                               
 Select one of the following:                                                  
                                                                               
 1 STEP RESTART                    Request a Step Restart                      
 2 JOB RESTART                     Request a Job  Restart                      
 3 START CLEANUP                   Request Cleanup                             
 4 START CLEANUP WITH AR           Request Cleanup with AR task                
 5 DISPLAY CLEANUP                 Display Cleanup result

The restart and cleanup options are the following:

Step restart
Job restart
Start cleanup
Start cleanup with AR
Display cleanup

The restart function is closely connected to the cleanup and automatic recovery functions. See Data set cleanup and Planning for recovery and restart for an overview of these functions and a description of how to activate them.

Note that in EQQRCLSE you can also change the proposed value for the following field:

EDIT JCL
- This field is applicable only to the STEP RESTART and JOB RESTART options. DEFAULT is the last value used in the ISPF dialog. To edit the JCL that will be resubmitted via the SR or JR options, you must set this field to YES.

To execute the Restart and cleanup function, the EQQCLEAN pre-step is added as the first step in the submitted JCL. This happens also when the cleanup actions are not triggered from ISPF but are started automatically by the Controller.

Since the EQQCLEAN step has to be added before all other existing steps, when an INCLUDE statement is present before the first step in a JCL, the EQQCLEAN step is added before that INCLUDE. Therefore, you should avoid specifying the JOBLIB DD in an INCLUDE or you should list this kind of INCLUDE (containing JOBLIB or other JCL statements that need to be placed before the EXEC) using the RCLOPTS SKIPINCLUDE keyword.

Note: The usage of this parameter does not solve the JCL errors caused by INCLUDEs that contain both JOBLIB and EXEC statements. They must be split into two separate INCLUDEs: one for the JOBLIB and one for the EXECs.

If the INCLUDE that contains the JOBLIB statement is nested within other INCLUDEs , you must add the most external INCLUDE to the SKIPINCLUDE list, as this is the only one visible to the JCL tailoring process.

This problem does not occur with expanded JCL because it does not contain INCLUDE statements.

Note:

With PQ87904 APAR, when the EQQCLEAN step fails with RC>=8, then all subsequent steps in the job are forced to FLUSH. This causes the operation to be marked as Ended-in-error with the 'Status of operation on workstation' set to CLNP, whichever completion checking logic has been implemented.
Same restrictions apply as for changing the operation status to ready by selecting option 6 (GENERAL) from the MODIFYING AN OPERATION IN THE CURRENT PLAN panel. In particular, a step or job restart request might imply a request to change to ready the status of an operation with conditional successors already started, completed, suppressed by condition, or ended in error. In this case the scheduler issues message EQQM208E. Only when rerunning an occurrence you might indirectly obtain this kind of change.