Richard,

Back in V1 of the product, the limitation of 20 operands on the command
line was thought to be a good idea.  Many (if not all) UNIX shells expand
un-quoted wildcard characters with a list of files that match in the
current directory.  The limit of 20 operands was put in place to
short-circuit a user who issued a command like: dsmc sel /home/*  and
accidentally got the wildcard expanded by the shell.  In fact, the message
you receive says something to that affect:

ANS1102E Excessive number of command line arguments passed to the program!
ANS1133W An expression might contain a wildcard not enclosed in quotes.

You are correct in pointing out that in today's environment 20 operands is
not very flexible.  To that end, here is what I can tell you about the
current product and welcome any suggestions.

In TSM 4.2.2 and 5.1.5.2, we introduced the testflag NOOPERANDLIMIT. Coded
on the command line as:
dsmc sel <fs> -testflag=nooperandlimit
This gives UNIX systems the ability pass in up to 450 operands (in 4.2.2);
in 5.1.5.2 it is for all operating systems and the limit is 512.

Having said this, you may encounter another one of the TSM backup-archive
client's command-line parsing limits: only 2048 total bytes are allowed.
If this is exceeded, you will see message:

ANS1209E The input argument list exceeds the maximum length of 2048
characters.

The customers for whom the NOOPERANDLIMIT (all of whom were running UNIX)
was introduced have been satisfied with the new operand limit and there
have not yet been any complaints about only accepting 2048 bytes.

Questions to you:

1.  Do you think TSM is being too cautious in trying to protect the
wild-card expansion, i.e., would you rather see us just drop the testflag
and let the client accept 512 (or more) operands.  Is this worth the
trade-off of stopping unwanted wild-card expansions?
2.  Any thoughts about how many operands and bytes one really needs the
command-line client to accept (if 512 operands / 2048 bytes is not
sufficient).

Thanks,
Jim Smith

J.P. (Jim) Smith
TSM Client Development


>I have an AIX system which has 65 filesystems in total and I want to
>backup 27 filesystems out of these. Is there any other way apart from
>specifying each one of them (there again we have limitaion of max 20
>objects in a single schedule/command). Anything more intelligent (???)
>is welcome...

The limit of 20 names on a command line is some developer's mighty
poor concept of product usability, artificially handicapping the command
in an environment which affords far more flexibility.
You can get around this with the Unix 'xargs' command.  I'd recommend
getting familiar with it, as it can be very useful.

  Richard Sims, BU