Job control statements

For every job that you submit, you need to tell MVS™ where to find the appropriate input, how to process that input (that is, what program or programs to run), and what to do with the resulting output.

You use JCL to convey this information to MVS through a set of statements known as job control statements. JCL's set of job control statements is quite large, enabling you to provide a great deal of information to MVS.

Most jobs, however, can be run using a very small subset of these control statements. Once you become familiar with the characteristics of the jobs you typically run, you may find that you need to know the details of only some of the control statements.

Within each job, the control statements are grouped into job steps. A job step consists of all the control statements needed to run one program. If a job needs to run more than one program, the job would contain a different job step for each of those programs.