How can I determine the changes I've made to my ISPF Edit data before I save it?

Question

I've been editing and testing JCL for sometime without doing a save under ISPF Edit. I changed something and the JCL now fails (JCL Error). I know I can look in the jobs sysout using SDSF but is there a way to find out what I changed while in ISPF Edit?

Answer 1

For #2 - Or if you avoid PDSE's like I do, the CBT Tape PDS command has the RESTORE function where you can often find the previous member.

Answer 2

There are two answers:

1. Providing you have not issued a Edit SAVE command then you can enter compare * x to see the records removed, added, or changed. If you have performed a SAVE then this will not be possible.

2. If, and I highly recommended, you are using PDSE member generations and using the open-source PDSEGEN tool (https://github.com/lbdyck/pdsedgen), then you can issue a compare -n where 'n' is a previous generation.

hope this helps