Supported wildcard characters

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When defining copy requests, you can specify masks for data set names, volser values, and program names. A mask is composed of part of a name or volser value and one or more wildcards that represent the remaining characters. Tape Optimizer matches your masks against actual data to determine which tapes or data sets to act upon.

The wildcards that you can use varies, depending on the task that you are performing:
  • If you are defining a basic copy request based on volsers, or if you are creating a filter based on program names, volsers, or data set names, you can use only the trailing asterisk (*) wildcard. This wildcard represents one or more characters at the end of a name or volser value.
  • If you are specifying criteria for renaming the tape data sets to be copied, you can use the standard asterisk (*) wildcard or a special percent sign (%) wildcard. Both wildcards represent zero or more characters. However, the asterisk (*) wildcard is used for "find and replace" type of renaming operations, whereas the percent sign (%) wildcard is used for "append" type of renaming operations. For more information, see Criteria for renaming tape data sets.
  • If you are defining a basic copy request based on data set names, you can use any of the wildcards that DFSMSrmm™ supports for data-set-name masks. These wildcards include the following:
    • A single trailing asterisk (*) to represent a qualifier or any number of characters within a data set name, for example, PDUSER.*
    • A percent sign (%) to represent a single character, for example, PDUSER.GT%.DATA