HFS or ZFS file triggering

The product package includes a file watching utility. After installing the product, you find this utility as load-module EQQFLWAT in the SEQQLMD0 library. You can use it to check for file system changes of HFS or ZFS files and directories, for example when you want to make sure that a file exists before running a job that processes that file. By defining a job that runs this utility, you can implement file dependency, that is a relationship between a file and an operation in which specific activity on the file determines the starting of the operation. For example, you can define the job that runs EQQFLWAT as predecessor of the operation depending on the file.

The user running EQQFLWAT must have execute (x) access to the directory path that contains files to be monitored.

The SEQQSAMP library contains EQQFLWAT member as sample JCL to call the file watching utility.

On IBM Workload Scheduler for z/OS Agents and on fault-tolerant agents in end-to-end configurations the utility uses a file named filwatchdb to save its file monitoring data. You can use the -database argument to specify an extension for file filwatchdb that is different from the default. In this way, you can use a particular database file for every application of the file watching utility that you make.