I was thinking about viewing SPOOL files, and I thought I’d share the story of how *UTQA came to be written.

COM-PLETE comes with a SPOOL utility, *UQ. Some time around 1990 or so, we got a new release of COM-PLETE that significantly changed the appearance of the output of the A subcommand, the one that shows active jobs. Lots and lots of developers were complaining, with some reason since the old version had showed drained and idle initiators while the new one doesn’t. We had recently installed the first version of Natural Process (since renamed Entire System Server) and I was figuring out what could be done with it. As I read about the SPOOL-related views, I thought, “I could write a simple program that replicated the old behavior of *UQ’s A screen.” So I did. I gave it what I thought was the obvious name, *UTQA, since it was a UT utility that replicated the old *UQ A subcommand. I showed it to John Camden and he wanted it expanded to replicate all the functionality of *UQ. I didn’t see much point in that, since everything else in *UQ still worked like before. However, Marshall Thomason, our DBA at the time, decided to run with it, so he wrote the rest of this application. A few other people have maintained it since then; in particular, Jim Bullock added support for sending output to “green print” a few years ago.

So that’s the story. If you’re wondering what I use, I usually use Natural ISPF. I’ll go to *UTQA when I want to see idle or drained initiators, or to use the green print function. I still use *UQ to scan SYSLOG, or for its non-SPOOL functionality.