Technical Information › Program Properties Table › PPT Privileges

PPT Privileges

The privileges assigned in the PPT are powerful and should be appropriately restricted. They do not convey, however, anything that an APF‑authorized program could not obtain itself with a little extra coding. The PPT is just a convenient way to assign these powers.

The CA Auditor fields and the corresponding PPT flags are of greatest concern to system auditors. Several fields are shown, however, that can be useful to technical support or systems programming personnel:

NON‑CANCEL (PPTNCAL)

Prevents the operator from canceling the program. The program can still be removed from the system by using the FORCE jobname,ARM command, but this is done only in emergencies because it can impact the operating system.

SWAP (PPTNSWP)

Prevents swapping out the program’s storage to auxiliary storage. This is a performance option for programs that are frequently inactive but must respond quickly when needed. It saves the system overhead required by swapping the storage back in. Use it with discretion because it can degrade the performance of the rest of the system.

SMF TIMING BYPASS (PPTSYSTK)

Indicates whether job‑step timing is enforced for the program.

CPU AFFN (PPTCPUA)

Designates the processors in a multiprocessor environment where the program is permitted to run. All unmodified IBM PPT entries designate that the programs run on all processors.