1. In the command prompt, type FTP <HOST IP ADDRESS>
2. Enter your USER ID and PASSWORD to Login
3. Enter the command “PROMPT OFF” so as you do not get notification for every member in the PDS
4. Use the below command to get all the members in the PDS
mget your.pds.name(*)
If you need only the ones that start with a character (for example “A”), use below command
mget your.pds.name(A*)
5. Above command will download all the members from the PDS to the folder that the command prompt is currently pointing to.
Usually it would be C:\ or C:\Users\(windows logon id)
6. The format of each member would be
‘YOUR.PDS.NAME(MEMBER)’
7. If you want to rename the files to have just the member name MEMBER with extension of .txt (so that you can open it in a text editor), the good method that I found was to use PowerShell to rename all the files in a go.
a)
get-childitem *.* | foreach { rename-item $_ $_.Name.Replace(“YOUR.PDS.NAME(“, “”) }
b)
get-childItem -exclude “*.*” | WHere-Object{!$_.PsIsContainer} | Rename-Item -newname {$_.name + “.txt”}
c) get-childitem *.* | foreach { rename-item $_ $_.Name.Replace(“’”, “”) }
d) get-childitem *.* | foreach { rename-item $_ $_.Name.Replace(“(“, “”) }
e) get-childitem *.* | foreach { rename-item $_ $_.Name.Replace(“)”, “”) }