Information Systems:PASE on IBM i

Overview

This article is about PASE (Portable Application Solutions Environment) on IBM i. PASE is a licensed program that comes pre-installed with IBM i (I think). It can best be described as a Linux/Unix (*nix) shell within the IBM i OS, so commands like ls, cat and grep work. This article is somewhat conversational in tone and more of an opinion piece, since PASE as an OS feature is pretty straightforward, yet its place and future developmente in the IBM i space is much more of a mystery.

Philosophical concerns

PASE is evolving to be more and more functional, even in some ways offering functionality not available in core IBM i (e.g. sFTP). 5733-OPS relies on it entirely (you can't run a Python program on the IBM i command line!). Given this, it is quite confusing where IBM plans to go with PASE. AIX and Linux on Power already exist if a true *nix environment on a Power system is desired. On the other hand, utilities like NETSTAT and FTP were built and integrated into the OS as native tools, so there was obviously interest from IBM to make their OS do what others can.

The problem with PASE is that running stuff within it still doesn't feel as native as running stuff on IBM i command line. Maybe that's just personal interpretation or perception, but there's an 'emulated' sense to it. For example, when running a program, the accompanying job log is devoid of the usual details as would be found when executing an RPG program. And when calling a job, there is no equivalent %PATH% or library list mechanism, so you must specify the entire path name.