The FREE-FOR-DELETION attribute introduced for files on SF and SM pubsets (see the commands CREATE-FILE and MODIFY-FILE-ATTRIBUTES as well as the CATAL macro, DELDATE operand) enables the user to define a period after which his/her files may be deleted irrespective of access control.
Files which have reached this deletion date are detected using the selection criteria of SHOW-FILE-ATTRIBUTES and DELETE-FILE or FSTAT and ERASE. The user or systems support can create simple cleanup procedures for the deletion of any files that have reached their deletion date.
Cleanups can be performed either decentrally by the individual users, or centrally by systems support. Systems support can use centralized cleanups, for instance, in the event of memory bottlenecks to free storage space by deleting released files.