AMBLIST is useful and even essential in many cases. However, there are a few limitations that you should be aware of.

1. AMBLIST does not display all the internal control blocks of program objects. Therefore, AMBLIST's output may not be sufficient to diagnose a problem which requires knowledge of such information.
2. If there is anything wrong with the module (program object or load module), AMBLIST may fail. Sometimes specifying OUTPUT=MODLIST in the AMBLIST job will help in this situation, since the XREF portion of the output is highly dependent on all the cross links between ESD and RLD being correct.

Here are three JCL examples for the invocation of AMBLIST:

//EXAMPLE1   EXEC   PGM=AMBLIST,REGION=16M
//SYSPRINT   DD     SYSOUT=*
//LOADLIB1   DD     DSN=APPS.PDSE,DISP=(SHR)
//SYSIN      DD     *
    LISTLOAD  DDN=LOADLIB1,MEMBER=(APP1)
/*
//EXAMPLE2   EXEC   PGM=AMBLIST,REGION=16M
//SYSPRINT   DD     SYSOUT=*
//LOADLIB2   DD     DSN=GAMES.PDSE,DISP=(SHR)
//SYSIN      DD     *
    LISTLOAD  DDN=LOADLIB2,MEMBER=(APP1),OUTPUT=MODLIST
/*
//EXAMPLE3   EXEC   PGM=AMBLIST,REGION=16M
//SYSPRINT   DD     SYSOUT=*
//HFS1       DD     PATH='/u/userid/main',PATHDISP=(KEEP,KEEP)
//SYSIN      DD     *
    LISTLOAD  DDN=HFS1,OUTPUT=MODLIST
/*

You can also invoke AMBLIST using the UNIX amblist command. Here are three examples of invoking amblist from the UNIX shell:

echo " LISTLOAD MEMBER=(APP1)" | amblist "//'apps.pdse'" > APP1.both.amblist

echo " LISTLOAD MEMBER=APP1,OUTPUT=MODLIST" > amblist.ctl
amblist "//'apps.pdse'" > APP1.modlist.amblist < amblist.ctl

amblist main | grep 'ENTRY POINT' # where "main" is a program in the working 
directory LISTLOAD OUTPUT=MODLIST # needs leading white space; output starts 
as (each) control statement is entered ^D # EOF: in raw mode, type CTRL-D, in 
OMVS ¢D, by default