To avoid the possibility of another user mounting a particular device before you enter the MOUNT command, you can optionally allocate the device before issuing the MOUNT command. Use the DCL command ALLOCATE to provide your process with exclusive access to a physical device until you either deallocate the device or terminate your process. Optionally, you can associate a logical name with the device. The format for the ALLOCATE command is as follows:

ALLOCATE device-name[:] logical-name[:]