"WHEN OTHER" logic in SORT

 If I wanted to extract all the records having '1111' as the first four bytes, into a dataset, those with '2222' to another, '3333' to yet another, and the remaining records to a fourth dataset(here is where the WHEN OTHER is required).


OUTFIL with the SAVE parameter will capture any records which weren't included/were excluded from any of the other output datasets, if that is a requirement of your process.

Here is an example :

//S1       EXEC PGM=SORT
//SYSOUT   DD SYSOUT=*                  
//SYSUDUMP DD SYSOUT=*                  
//SORTIN   DD DSN=...  input data set
//KEY1111  DD DSN=...
//KEY2222  DD DSN=...
//KEY3333  DD DSN=...
//KEYOTHER DD DSN=...
//SYSIN    DD *
 SORT FIELDS=COPY
 OUTFIL FNAMES=KEY1111,INCLUDE=(1,4,CH,EQ,C'1111')
 OUTFIL FNAMES=KEY2222,INCLUDE=(1,4,CH,EQ,C'2222')
 OUTFIL FNAMES=KEY3333,INCLUDE=(1,4,CH,EQ,C'3333')
 OUTFIL FNAMES=KEYOTHER,SAVE
/*

Here the file mentioned with DDname KEYOTHER will have all the records that were not included in the first three output files.