It’s easy, you have three basic  statements:

• JOB: Provides a name (jobname) for the batch.
• EXEC: Provides the name of a program to execute.
• DD: For Data Definition, provides inputs/outputs to the program.

Let’s see a JCL example:

//MYJOB     JOBTES 1
//MYSORT    EXEC PGM=SORT
//SORTIN    DD DISP=SHR,DSN=SUP01.TAB.TEST
//SORTOUT   DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSOUT    DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSIN     DD *
SORT FIELDS=(1,4,CH,A)
/*

Now, try to understand what’s happen here.

• MYJOB is the jobname associates to the workload, here it’s “JOBTES”.
• MYSORT is the stepname, which ask the system to execute a program called “SORT”.
• SORTIN is the program input, here with the DSN (Data Set Name) SUP01.TAB.TEST, and the dataset can be shared (DISP=SHR).
• SORTOUT is the SORT program output.
• SYSOUT specifies to send system output to JES (Job Entrey Subsystem), but it’s also possible to send the outpu to a dataset.
• SYSIN tell the SORT program which fields of the SORTIN data records are to be sorted.

Enough for the moment, JCL is quite hard at beginning !