File formats

The z/OS® operating system traditionally processes data in a record-oriented fashion. On other platforms (UNIX and Windows) it is byte (stream) oriented.

The z/OS operating system offers many file format choices, including record sizes, block sizes and record types for record-oriented processing.

Some of the most common record types are: Fixed or Fixed Block, and Variable or Variable Blocked record formats.

The IBM® Transformation Extender run under Batch and CICS® environments provides an additional Record Separators execution command (/V) to enable special handling of data sets with variable length record formats, if required.

The special handling of record separators for variable length records occurs during initialization, finalization, or both depending upon your source, input data, and targets, output data.