z/TPF APAR download tools

Download Description

The z/TPF APAR download tools are a set of shell scripts that run on the Linux on IBM Z platform. They can be used to:

• Retrieve the APAR information posted to the z/TPF maintenance website
• Download, and unpack available (closed) z/TPF and z/TPFDF product APARs (including open source APARs)
• Merge downloaded APARs into a single directory
• Generate a composite list of prerequisite APARs for a specified APAR.
• Identify APARs where the APAR download file was made available before a specified date, but the APAR download file was updated after that date.

This package was updated on 6 October 2015 for the new APAR Download CSV file that will not contain a critical or severity column. The new APAR Download CSV format without the critical and severity columns will be available starting 15 November 2015.

This package was updated on 9 January 2017 to include a script that can be used to list the open APARs in the z/TPF APAR Data spreadsheet.

The aparDownload script in this package was updated on 16 February 2017 to work with Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) tokens that were added to the secure FTP download site.

The aparDownload and aparMerge scripts were updated on 8 March 2017 to work with download packages for the IBM® 64-bit Runtime Environment for z/TPF, Java™ Technology Edition, Version 8.

This package was updated on 29 September 2017 to include the aparPrereq script that can be used to generate the composite list of prerequisite APARs for a specified APAR.

This package was updated on 23 October 2017 to add a -skipOS option to the aparDownload script that can be used to omit the download of open source APARs during the download process.

The aparDownload command was updated on 20 February 2018 to support open source APAR download files that include the APAR number as the top-level folder name in the download file, for example "PJ12345/opensource/". Before this update, the top-level folder of the contents of the download file was expected to be "opensource/". The update prevents the APAR number folder name from being duplicated when the download file is unpacked, which in turn prevents the APAR number folder name from being promoted when the aparMerge command is run.

The aparList, aparListOpen, and aparPrereq commands were updated on 4 December 2018 to reference a new download server.

The aparDownload command was updated on 11 December 2018 to support TPF hosted open source download packages.

The aparDownload command was updated on 24 December 2018 to omit the APAR number folder from the unpack target folder.

The aparDownload, aparList, aparListOpen, aparMerge, and aparPrereq commands were updated on 11 January 2019 to reflect the APAR delivery nomenclature change from "PUT" to "Close Group".

The aparDownload command was updated on 23 September 2019 to address formatting changes in the TPF hosted open source APAR download pages.

The aparDownload and aparMerge commands were updated on 3 October 2019 to better handle packages removed for download because they are more than 4 years old.

The aparPkgcheck command was added on 8 July 2021 to provide a way to identify APAR download packages first made available before a user-specified date and then updated after that user-specified date.

The aparDownload, aparList, aparMerge, and aparPkgcheck commands were updated on 7 July 22.  All grep commands issued against the APAR Data CSV file were updated to include the -a option to ensure that grep treats the file as an ASCII file. The existence of some special characters, like the registered trademark symbol, can cause newer versions of grep to misinterpret the file as binary.

The aparDownload and aparPkgcheck commands were updated for csrfToken extraction on 6 December 22 to work with updated software on the IBM download server.