CICS programming commands

The general format of a CICS® command is EXECUTE CICS (or EXEC CICS) followed by the name of the required command and possibly one or more options.

You can write many application programs using the CICS command-level interface without any knowledge of, or reference to, the fields in the CICS control blocks and storage areas. However, you might need to get information that is valid outside the local environment of your application program. You can use ADDRESS and ASSIGN commands to access such information.

When you use the ADDRESS and ASSIGN commands, various fields can be read but should not be set or used in any other way. Do not use any of the CICS fields as arguments in CICS commands, because these fields might be altered by the EXEC interface modules.

You can use the INQUIRE, SET, and PERFORM commands for application programs to access information about CICS resources. These commands are known as system programming commands. The application program can retrieve and modify information for CICS data sets, terminals, system entries, mode names, system attributes, programs, and transactions. These commands, plus the spool commands of the CICS interface to the Job Entry Subsystem (JES), are primarily for system programmers to use.

For reference information about CICS programming commands, see CICS API commands.