Well it doesn't work exactly as Hugh described, but I think the main error is that the JOB card should be first of the deck :-) You can also decide not to put a JOB card at all, in which case it is implicit. But if you put one, it means that everything before the first JOB card (and between EOJ and next JOB card) should be discarded. This is useful if your mailer or gateway inserts trash before the beginning of the message (like an RFC822 tag moved in the mail body "because this brain-damaged IBM RSCS violates RFC822"). This trash would be executed as commands, might cause an "Unknown command" message, and then the remainder of the job would be flushed. //STUFF DD "BLAH" is valid and equivalent to: //STUFF DD * BLAH /* But '//STUFF DD' is a missing argument error. Eric