Mainframe, MVS and zOS Discussion

Hi,

Could someone please explain me if IBM DFSort, ICETOOL, ICEMAN, ICEGENER - are they just same? When to use what? 

Hello.

They are all part of the same "product" collectively known as DFSort.

ICEGENER is a drop-in replacement for IEBGENER that has some performance improvements. Any place you are currently using IEBGENER to simply copy a complete file you can plug ICEGENER in it's place.

DFSORT is the main sort utility and is invoked by running either the SORT program or ICEMAN. You'd use this to perform sorting or file editing operations, something a little more than just copying the file as-is.

ICETOOL is a utility which allows you to handle multiple DFSORT operations at once. It will also allow you to perform some more advanced processing on the datasets being handled. For example, you can perform sort/merge operations that will splice two files together.

ICEMAN, SORT are two of the program aliases that can be used to invoke the sort product. ICEMAN is the program name for DFSORT. You can invoke DFSORT with PGM=ICEMAN. DFSORT is also shipped with an alias of SORT, so you can use PGM=SORT too.


There is more explanation in this post: https://zmainframes.com/zlog/pgmsort-pg ... -all-same/