IBM manuals

IBM conveniently makes all of their z/OS manuals available as PDF (Acrobat) files on the Library page off the z/OS home page. You can select each manual one at time and save it with a meaningful name but this is tedious. This page tries to show a method to fix that for those like me that don't get the CD shipped to them with these PDF files.

Downloading IBM Manuals using Firefox and DownloadThemAll

First check out the Setup page to ensure you have all the software installed that you need.

Go to the z/OS Home page
Double Click on Library
Click on the PDF link for the operating system level you want, In April 2009 z/OS 1.10 PDF page (This may change!)
In Firefox, go to the Tools pulldown and select DownloadThemAll and a dialog box like the following will appear:
In "Save Files in:" - Click on the folder icon and select your target folder.
In "Filters" - Click on All Files
In "Filters" - Click on New Filter (maybe not needed but it works)
In "Fast filtering" - type in pdf
Click on the Start Button and you should see a status page with the downloads:

Paraphrasing Harrison Ford in "Six Days Seven Nights": "We could be here for a long long long long-long-long time".

FYI: All of the PDF files on the z/OS 1.10 PDF page turned out to be 1.62gb.

Show titles for the downloaded IBM Manuals using pyPdf (Python library)

First check out the Setup page to ensure you have all the software installed that you need.

After the downloads are complete, you will have a folder with a bunch of cryptically named files with the 8 character IBM manual number with .pdf for the extension. Let's try to fix this using pyPdf. You can list them using PDFList:

python PDFList

...
##1 iea2b540.pdf ##2 z/OS V1R6.0 MVS JCL User's Guide
##1 iea2b680.pdf ##2 z/OS V1R10.0 MVS JCL Reference
##1 iea2e151.pdf ##2 z/OS V1R9.0 MVS Initialization and Tuning Guide
##1 iea2e291.pdf ##2 z/OS V1R10.0 MVS Initialization and Tuning Reference
##1 iea2e490.pdf ##2 z/OS V1R10.0 MVS Installation Exits
##1 iea2e510.pdf ##2 z/OS V1R5.0 MVS Using the Functional Subsystem Interface
##1 iea2f191.pdf ##2 z/OS V1R10.0 MVS Setting Up a Sysplex
##1 iea2f261.pdf ##2 z/OS V1R10.0 MVS Using the Subsystem Interface
##1 iea2g192.pdf ##2 z/OS V1R10.0 MVS System Commands
...

As you might has guessed, the output above was an abbreviated part of the MVS bookshelf.

At this point I *think* want to leave all of the files with the IBM-given names and generate the commands to build either:

Macintosh Aliases using the ln command as demonstrated here on this Java page.

*or*
Windows Shortcuts (for the Windows PC at work)

I would guess there are some characters in the PDF titles that are not valid file names on either the Macintosh or Windows operating system so that has to be taken into account.

Another option would be to generate an html (web) page with the links to the pdf files on the local directory.

Browse the download folder using Adobe Bridge

If you have Adobe Bridge, it can be used on the directory with cryptic PDF names to help you find the manual you are looking for because it displays the first page of the PDF in the preview window:

Return to the MVSintosh:: MVS and Macintosh page.

Note: Copyrights and trademarks are owned by their respective owners like IBM, MVS, PDF, Adobe, etc.