Bonjour!

This is probably the hardest part 2 challenge. That’s probably why it’s the last one. Ahh, what am I saying? Shouldn’t we get to work? I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails and contact form submissions for this post so I’ll try my best to make this blogpost as clear as possible.

Maybe something less interesting, but I’ve sped up my blog by removing some sharing buttons and other useless plugins. Hazah for a less bloated experience!

Number Hunt

These are the data set types we’re going to explore for numbers:

Look what I found! 1923. But what data type is that? According to the table above it is just normal ASCII.

Now this is obviously a packed decimal. 454B. What does that exactly mean? We also have to convert it to a number we can use in our calculation. Let’s take a look at the packed decimal table.

So we have the number 454 and the sign digit B. B is in this case a negative sign digit. Which means we have the number -454.

Now we need to access HUNT3.

It first said VSAM.ESDS, I just changed that to HUNT3 and pressed enter. Set the editor format to HEX.

Now we have to find a number at line 1 column 12 to 15.

It says 01914C. This is again, a packed decimal. The packed decimal sign digit is C which means that the number is positive. So we have +1914.

Unix File Name /z/z#####/hunt4

We are now in our UNIX environment. Inhere, we have the file hunt4. Let’s edit it using the command oedit hunt4.

We have to find two numbers. The first is at line 2 column 18 to 21 and the second is at line 5 column 1 to 2.

Two different data types. 015F is a packed decimal and 2004 is normal ASCII. 15 is the number and F has to be a positive sign digit. 2004 is… well, 2004. Press F3 and type exit in the OMVS command line to return to the ISPF Primary option menu.

I have changed the employeenumber of our previous query. This will not invalidate the solution to part 14 as the result is already copied to P2.OUTPUT(#14). No worries! After editing, press F3 and enter to execute to get the output.

This employee’s phonenumber is 1793. That’s out last number.

THE RESULT

So we have all our numbers:

• +1923
• -454
• +1914
• +15
• +2004
• +1793

We need to take the sum. 1923-454+1914+15+2004+1793=7195. No witty number this time IBM? Or am I wrong?

Actions to complete challenge successfully

Now let’s navigate to Z#####.JCL member name P2DONE and replace the 0000 with our number.

Let’s submit this and check P2.OUTPUT(#15).

It’s there! Hopefully I’m right 🙂

Completing Part 2

Let’s enter the primary command TSO SCOREP2 from the ISPF Primary Option Menu and navigate to P2.STATUS afterwards to see if all our challenges are complete!

Now let’s navigate to P2.STATUS.

Everything is correct! YAY!

Note: my output is blue because I entered the line command b for browse.

Together we have gained experience in:

• TN3270 Emulator
• TSO, Time Sharing Option
• ISPF, Interactive Productivity Facility
• ISPF Editor
• SDSF, System Display and Search Facility
• Hexadecimal, EBCDIC, ASCII, and Packed Decimal
• JCL, Job Control Language
• Sequential and Partitioned Data Sets
• VSAM Data Sets
• IDCAMS Utility Program
• Unix System Services and Unix Files
• DB2 SQL

When do I get the badge?

Expect to receive it within the next 2 weeks. Yes, it might or might not take that long.

Did you like this challenge?

I liked it! Some may see this as an annoying challenge because it’s rather hard and long, but this challenge actually requires you to navigate to all sorts of places, work with all sorts of data sets and read all sorts of data types!

You should be proud of finishing this challenge, are you?