I recently got a question from a collegue. He wanted to transfer an entire PDS in an email to someone else. You can download all the member of the PDS with FTP, zip up all the files and transfer that. But it might be easier to use this trick.

Create a PS from in PDS by using the XMIT command. XMIT is a TSO command that you can use to transfer a dataset to another user, or system, or both.

The trick now to “zip” a PDS with XMIT is to XMIT the PDS to yourself on the same system:

xmit userid.node dsn(dataset) outdsn(outdsn)

This creates the “zipped” PS dataset, that you can send through email. If you download the file to your Mac or PC, makes sure you download it in binary mode.

The receiver can “unzip” the file into a PDS with the accompanying receive command:

RECEIVE INDSN(dataset) DSN(outdataset)