If you submit a print job with a shell command, there is no way to check on the status of the job. (The lpstat and cancel commands are not supported.) All output looks the same on the queue in terms of job number. Print jobs could have different setups such as destination or class, but normally the only difference is the number of lines, bytes, or pages and the time of day the output was available to print.

If your operating system includes SDSF, you can use the SDSF panels to monitor and control a TSO/E or batch print job, look at its output as it is running, check its completion, and release it to print.

For a batch job, the STATUS command can provide status if you specify the job name as your user ID followed by one character (for example, MACNEILA). You cannot use the STATUS command for print jobs that you ran using lp or PRINTDS. STATUS takes either no operands or one or more job names as operands. If you use no operands, the system looks for jobs with names that start with your user ID followed by one character. If you list a job name, it looks for that job name.

Requirement: If you use SDSF to view the output from a job where the job name was assigned using the _BPX_JOBNAME environment variable, you must set the SDSF group function APPC to ON. If APPC is set OFF, the assigned job name will not be displayed, and the jobs will differ only by job number. For more information, see z/OS SDSF Operation and Customization.