Once in every three years or so, I fire up an editor that I can’t exit.

First it was vi, many many moons ago.

Then came emacs. Ctrl-x, Ctrl-c was the LAST thing on my mind.

I’ve been working with z/OS for a while now and never had the opportunity to play around much. Being mostly restricted to USS (UNIX System Services) that offers a friendly UNIX shell, hiding the arcane operating system beneath, I haven’t really had the opportunity to mess things up much. As anyone who likes to play around with new operating systems would tell you: that’s no way to learn.

The last couple of days have been spent dipping my feet in TSO, taking notes feverishly, and throwing commands at it, sometimes with no real idea of what it does. Somewhere down the line I happened to type EDIT.

Before long, it was evident that I had stumbled upon an editor that I didn’t know how to exit.

And so the usual panic ensued. After many failed attempts, broken-spirited, I resorted to google. Several queries later, hidden deep in google groups, I stumbled upon exactly what I needed.

The magic word was END!

not :wq.

not Ctrl-x Ctrl-c.

END!!!

EDIT car
 ENTER DATA SET TYPE-
TEXT
 DATA SET OR MEMBER NOT FOUND, ASSUMED TO BE NEW
 INPUT
 00010 Dude, where's my car?
 00020
 EDIT
SAVE
 EDIT
END
 READY