Spooler Utilities Reference Manual

Introduction to the Spooler Subsystem
Spooler Utilities Reference Manual—522295-003
2-9
Peruse and Spoolcom Comparison
Peruse and Spoolcom Comparison
Many commands in Peruse and Spoolcom are nearly equivalent. For example, the
Peruse DEV and Spoolcom DEV commands both display the status of devices, and
many Peruse commands are also subcommands of the Spoolcom JOB command
(COPIES, DEL, FORM, HOLDAFTER, OWNER, and PRI). However, Peruse and
Spoolcom have significant differences:

Peruse provides a convenient means for monitoring and changing your jobs.
When you enter Peruse, you immediately see a list of the jobs you own in the
spooler subsystem, identified by job number and other job attributes. You can
examine a spooler job page-by-page or line-by-line, and you can use the FIND
command to locate specific character strings. With Peruse, you can use fewer
keystrokes than with Spoolcom to change a job attribute, send a job to a print
device, or delete a job.

Spoolcom is a tool that system operators use for monitoring and controlling the
spooler subsystem. All users can use Spoolcom to obtain status information on the
spooler components and on all spooler jobs in the system. In addition, all users
can use Spoolcom to change attributes of their own jobs, but this is done more
conveniently with Peruse.
Spooler Jobs and Job Attributes
When you request the spooler to print information, the request is called a spooler job.
The spooler assigns to each job a job number in the range 1 through 4095. (The
system operator can set the maximum job number to a lower value with the SPOOL
program. See Appendix A, SPOOL Program.) In addition to the job number, jobs have
seven primary attributes:

Batch number

Job priority

Job copies

Job report name

Job form name

Job location

Job state
Peruse allows you to display and alter these attributes. Descriptions of these attributes
follow.
Batch Number
The batch number identifies a batch job, which is a group of individual jobs that have
been linked together by the spooler or by the Peruse LINK command. Batch jobs are
described in detail in The Spooler and Batch Jobs on page 2-19.