RACF TSO commands

Most RACF® commands can be entered as RACF TSO commands. For a complete list of the RACF commands that can be entered as RACF TSO commands, see Table 1.

RACF list commands, such as LISTUSER * or LISTGRP *, can generate many thousands of lines of output. This quantity of output is not very usable except as input to a processing program and can exhaust address space resources below the 16M line.

Restriction: RACF commands that provide output listings (LISTDSD, LISTGRP, LISTUSER, RACDCERT, RACLINK, RLIST and SETROPTS) are designed to be issued by users, not by programs. IBM® does not support the processing of these commands by programs. The output format of these commands is not an intended interface and may change with any z/OS® release or as the result of service (PTFs) applied within a release. Programs should not examine the output of these commands. Instead, programs should use documented programming interfaces, such as the following:
  • The output file from the IRRDBU00 (database unload) utility, which was designed specifically for this use.
  • The results returned by the RACROUTE REQUEST=EXTRACT request.
  • The results returned by the ICHEINTY macro.
  • The results returned by the R_admin (IRRSEQ00) callable service when using one of the profile extract function codes, or one of the SETROPTS retrieval function codes.

The syntax of RACF TSO commands is the same as the syntax of TSO commands. For example, a comma or one or more blanks are valid delimiters for use between operands.

Note:
  1. Syntax of RACF commands and operands contains the key to symbols used in the command syntax diagrams.
  2. The TSO parse routines allow you to abbreviate an operand on a TSO command to the least number of characters that uniquely identify the operand. To avoid conflicts in abbreviations, it is a good practice to fully spell out all operands on commands that are hardcoded (as in programs, CLISTs and the RACF parameter library, for example).
  3. If you specify a keyword in the BASE segment multiple times on the same command, RACF uses only the last occurrence. If a keyword in a non-BASE segment (such as TSO, CICS®, SESSION) is specified multiple times on the same command, the last occurrence is also used except for keywords where a list of values is valid (such as ADDUSER USER1 NETVIEW(OPCLASS(value1 value2 value3 ...))). For these keywords, all values on all specifications are accepted.
  4. If you are sharing your RACF database with a VM system, you can administer VM classes from the MVS system. For RACF-provided VM classes see Supplied resource classes for z/VM systems. Detailed information about working with VM classes can be found in the for RACF 1.10 information.
  5. Make sure your job or logon specifies a region size large enough to run the commands, or they might ABEND unpredictably.