Distributed Operating Environment › Log Files › Spool Files

Spool Files

When jobs are executed on the agent, the output is stored in a set of spool directories. You can retrieve this data using the CA WA CA 7 Edition command AGFILE TYPE=SPOOL parameter or GS (“get spool”) command line option. Each time the same job executes, the output is appended to the file when the file exists. Thus if a job failed two times and succeeded on the third execution, all three outputs of the job execution are found in the same file. The latest execution is located at the end of the file.

Because spool can consume a large amount of storage space limited only by the amount of space available in the file system, clear the spool files periodically. The method differs between a UNIX system and a Windows system.

On UNIX, the agent can clear spool files automatically. The following parameters specified in the agentparm.txt file control the frequency and criteria when the spool is cleared. The default is to disable the spool clean.

runnerplugin.spool.clean.enable=true 
runnerplugin.spool.expire=nnt
runnerplugin.spool.sleep=nnt

nn

Indicates the number of the time (t) increments.

t

Indicates a time increment set to D (days), H (hours), or M (minutes).

If the time specified in the sleep parameter is greater than the time in the expire parameter, the expire parameter sets the sleep time. For example, to set up the agent to check the spool files every 36 hours and delete spool files that are older than 10 days, the following parameters are used:

runnerplugin.spool.clean.enable=true 
runnerplugin.spool.expire=10D 
runnerplugin.spool.sleep=36H

On Windows, you can clear agent spool files that are older than a specific number of days using the clearspool command. First, define the ESPAGENTDIR environment variable with the path to the agent installation directory. Enter the following command at the Windows command prompt:

clearspool n

n

Specifies the maximum number of days a spool file is maintained. The clearspool command removes all files older than n days.

Note: We recommend that you set the following to the same value:

• The runnerplugin.spool.expire parameter
• The number of days (n) for the clearspool
• The AGENTDAY parameter on the CA WA CA 7 Edition initialization file XPDEF statement

AGENTDAY specifies the number of days to retain information about the agent job on the CA7AGNT VSAM file. Once the spool file is cleared, the data on the CA7AGNT file is no longer needed.

Note: For more information about agent logs or job log, see the CA Workload Automation Agent for UNIX, Linux, or Windows Implementation Guide.