Difference between *FILE and *STMF elements oa a AS/400 ftp server

Question

I was trying to download files from an AS/400 ftp server using the apache FTPClient and it should work because the library correctly uses a OS400FTPEntryParser to parse the response from the server.

However this specific parser marks as valid files only the elements available on the ftp server having the file type set to *STMF while all my elements are flagged as *FILE on the ftp server and then marked as unknown type when parsed by the apache FTPClient. Also associated to every *FILE element I have a correspondent *MEM element that includes the file extension.

Before writing my own parser i'd like to undertand the difference between these two types and if there is a valid reason to mar these files as unknown.

Answer 1

Are you sure it's *MEM and not *MBR?

*STMF are stream files in the integrated file system. They are identical to the PC definition of a file.

*FILE objects are database tables and *MBR are named partitions within the table. Every *FILE has at least one *MBR.

The midrange and mainframe systems are unique in that you can actually retrieve the contents from a database table using FTP. The data is returned in a fixed length format.

For more information:

FTP - File systems and naming conventions