Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your JCL file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.
Convert JCL to another file type
To convert JCL files to another format, you need Hot Potatoes or other Text software.
Convert a file to JCL
To convert other file formats to the "Educational Quiz or Script" file type, you need software like Hot Potatoes or a similar tool.
About JCL files
.JCL files are primarily used as JCloze gap-fill quiz exercises created by Hot Potatoes, an educational authoring suite developed by Half-Baked Software. They store quiz parameters, text, and correct answers using an internal XML format. Alternatively, a .JCL file can be a Job Control Language script used on IBM mainframe operating systems to define batch job executions. The main disadvantage of the Hot Potatoes .JCL format is that it is strictly a proprietary authoring file. It is not playable by students, requires a local desktop installation to open, and cannot be executed natively in any web browser. Users must convert these files to make them accessible and useful for education. To deploy a quiz, the .JCL file must be converted and compiled into HTML. Standard online converters generally fail to process .JCL files because they lack the specific compilation logic required to generate interactive JavaScript forms from the raw XML. You usually need the original software to correctly export the data. Despite these proprietary hurdles, convert.guru provides a pragmatic workaround. Drag and drop your file to see what it is and convert it if supported. Because the Hot Potatoes variant uses underlying XML and the IBM variant uses plain text, our analyzer can often bypass the proprietary wrapper. We can extract the raw text or XML content, allowing you to recover your quiz data or script logic even without the original software.
Convert.Guru analyzes your JCL file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert JCL file to PYTHON, JAVA, TMP, TEMP, CACHE, LOG, BAK, OLD, NEW, PART, DOWNLOAD or CRDOWNLOAD, you can use Hot Potatoes or similar software from the "Quiz Authoring & Mainframe Scripts" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DEVICE, CACHE, SOCK, SYMLINK, PID, MOUNT, FIFO, LOG, PIPE, TMP, JUNCTION or TEMP files to JCL, try Hot Potatoes or another comparable tool in the "Quiz Authoring & Mainframe Scripts" category.
The JCL Converter Story
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our JCL converter.