Thanks to all for your comments on how to find out if the tape is there or
not. Your comments led me to write a program that detects if the tape is
in the drive and set it online or if it is not in the drive, detect that
and proceed on to other things in the jcl.

A father program creates/activates another program with suspending itself.
The created program uses HPDEVCONTROL, first passing 100 parm and then a
101 parm. I noticed that when the 101 parm is passed and there is no tape
in the drive, this intrinsic just sits there and waits for some
intervention. Subsequent emails in the list verified this. If the the 101
parm is successfully passed to the drive and the tape is put online, the
program sets a hpvar (or jcw if preferred). Meanwhile, the father program
has been in a state of sleep (bogus use of pause intrinsic), wakes up and
checks the hpvar. If it has the right message, it sets another hpvar to
continue the job stream, else it sets the hpvar to kill the job stream.

The two programs are in HP Cobol and if anyone would like them, I would be
glad to send them. (bogus use of pause intrinsic in Cobol mentioned above,
because pause takes a real for is passed value - Cobol does not like
real).

Again, thanks to all for leading me down this path that solved my problem.

#Joseph Norris (Perl - what else is there?/HP3000/Linux/CGI/Msql)
print @c=map chr $_+100,(6,17,15,16,-68,-3,10,11,16,4,1,14,-68,12,1,14,8,
-68,4,-3,-1,7,1,14,-68,6,11,15,1,12,4,-68,-22,11,14,14,5,15,-90);