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A-Shell Command Reference

1. Colon Commands Certain special commands begin with the colon and these must start in the first column command meang O outputs the text between the opening and closing angle brackets may span multiple lines This is the normal way to print operational messages on the screen from within CMD and DO files t trace causes all commands from that point forward to be traced i e be displayed on the screen This is very useful for debugging but may be too verbose for normal use r respond causes just the output of commands to be displayed the commands themselves do not display This produces a somewhat cleaner looking result s silence silences all output Unfortunately this is the default if neither t or r are supplied first causes the CMD or DO file to exit This is equivalent to the EXIT command stops and waits for keyboard input The input is then processed by whatever process is currently in effect i e either a program or the command line processor itself For example lt This command erases all files proceed k keyboard SET CTRLC Hit ENTER to proceed or C to abort K C will abort here E F RAS EF x N gt NT ER will just may be used in conjunction with k to append the keyboard input to a partial p partial command line For example R lt Enter name of file to display P EZTYP K A Shell Command Reference
2. Next Loop The syntax of For Next loops is the same under BASIC Plus but at runtime the termination condition is evaluated prior to the first iteration allowing the loop to have no iterations at all Under BASIC 1 3 and 1 4 For Next loops always execute the body of the loop at least once EDIT EDITS expr edit code The EDIT function modifies the specified string expression according to the edit code which may contain one or more of the following flags Remove spaces and tabs Remove CR LF FF RUB ESC NULL og Remove leading spaces and tabs Shrink multiple spaces tabs to one space Remove trailing spaces and tabs ODTIM ODTIM date time flags This function outputs the specified date and or time according to the formatting flags If date and or time is zero the current date time is used The flags are the same as those used by ODTIM SBR Refer to the A Shell Development Guide or Alpha Micro documentation for details on the flags page 106 A Shell Command Reference READ ONLY This optional modifier can be placed at the end of a random file open statement to open a file for read only access Any attempts to write to such a file will generate an error Aside from locking issues this mode may be used to dramatically speed up file access over a network for processes that require no locking such as reports Also see ASFLAG SBR in the A Shell XCALL Reference for a way to achieve this effect without using the BASIC P
3. as well as people who tend to forget what they were doing when the screen is suddenly cleared QUITWARN This command controls whether you get a warning message and request to confirm when you attempt to quit out of an editing session after making changes to the file Of course if you still quit accidentally you can always retrieve the BAK backup file but you must do that before you edit the file again UPDSSL This may be set to ON to force VUE to keep the shifted status line if there is one equal to the unshifted status line This prevents the line from blinking when you hit the SHIFT key This is only an issue in certain terminal emulation environments Function Keys The MIAME environment contains full function key support but these will only be usable within the editor if the appropriate function key translation files exist in account DSKO 7 0 These are files with the same name as defined for your terminal in the TRMDEF line of the MIAME configuration file and extension VUX A Shell Command Reference page 101 PCTDV VUX and PCTDVG VUX are supplied with A Shell Windows either of which may be copied or renamed if your A Shell Windows terminal driver is going by a different name Under A Shell UNIX there are several available terminal drivers am62a am62c am65 am75 wyseS0 etc each of which needs its own VUX file The FIXTRN utility may be used to create query or edit function key translation tables Under
4. etc PN Current p pn e g 7 6 VA Version of A Shell e g 4 6 753 VP Version of current program or command e g 1 0 123 If the title definition string contains any of the above variables the title will be automatically updated when the value of that variable changes For example if the title is defined via SET TITLE Job SNJ running SNP version VP in SND SPN Then whenever the program name excluding LITs or the current logged in device or PPN changes the title line will be updated and would appear something like this Job TSKAAB running MYPROG version 1 0 123 in DSKO 7 6 If you do not specify the TS prefix for top status line and you are not running on either A Shell Windows or using ZTERM as your emulator then the title will just be ignored If you do specify the TS prefix and you are running PolyShell then the title on the top status line will be updated whenever you switch to that window If you have job specific information in the title string then it is highly recommended that you use SET TITLE on each of the processes running under PolyShell otherwise when switching to a job or session with no title definition the previously displayed title will remain possibly causing confusion for the user TRACE options These are equivalent to the identically named TRACE options in the miame ini file Since they are primarily used only for debugging it is a handy convenience
5. lt file gt to display one screen full and then aborting HEAD SYS ERRMSG USA This next example is similar except it uses quotes to refer to a native host operating system file specification note that they are case sensitive under UNIX and also uses the L 5 switch to limit the display to the first 5 lines head vm miame miame ini L 5 This next example creates a file called VERDIR TXT which consists of the first line of each BASIC source file in the current project Assuming you adopted a standard of putting something meaningful and consistent on the first line of each source file this could be a very useful way to compare two sets of source files i e use the command below on each set of files then sort the resulting header files and compare them using SRCCOM head verdir txt bas l 1 d See the notes on TAIL for the same idea only counting from the end of the file page 106 A Shell Command Reference HOST The HOST command is a special A Shell command program It exits the A Shell command shell and returns to either the host operating system command level or host batch or shell script file which was used to invoke A Shell If an AMOS command sequence is piped into A Shell that is if the standard input file has been redirected for example with the following UNIX command S echo time ashell then the command sequence will be executed automatically and once the end of the standard input file is
6. 132 column mode if terminal supports it This allows the display of additional job status information including the number of disk reads writes queue locking operations commands or programs executed BASIC instructions executed keystrokes entered and accumulated time logged in Note that these statistics are only updated by the Inter Job Communication clock whose frequency is set by the IJCFREQ lt seconds gt command in the MIAME INI Z Similar to K but for zombies rather than phantoms A zombie is a job that is trying to exit but cannot because it lacks some kind of critical resource like a terminal or its original parent Unlike phantoms zombies can be a significant drain on the CPU resources of the system In most cases zombies are related to some kind of messy telnet disconnection Activate TRACE SIGHUP in the miame ini or using SET LIT and then examine the ashlog log file for further information about such disconnects A Shell Command Reference page 91 TAIL EEE eee TAIL outfile lt wildspec gt switches The TAIL command is similar to the eponymous UNIX command and is used to display or copy to another file the last N lines of a specified file or wildcard list of files Switches delete Required when an output file is specified that already exists lines Specify the number of lines to copy or display Default is 20 query Prompt for confirmation on each file See the notes on HEAD
7. ISMBLD 15 ISMUTL command 59 5 35 5 DRE Ss 55 J Job information 19 JOBALC 15 JSTAT command 60 K Key 62 Keyboard VUE command 102 KILL command 61 Kill job 61 A Shell Command Reference Kill task 80 L Landscape 69 LATIN SET option 73 Launch process 80 LF characters 95 LIB account defined 9 LICENS command 62 License info 17 License update 62 Line terminator 95 List tasks 80 LOAD command 63 Locking 28 60 64 LOCKS TRACE option 77 LOG command 64 Logical units 8 Login account 64 Login name 21 105 LOGOFF 15 LOKSER 64 74 LOKSER SET option 73 LOKUTL command 64 LONG switch on DIR LIT 43 LONGDIR SET option 73 LOOK 49 LOOKUP 15 LOOKUP statement 104 Loop statements 27 LP TRACE option 77 LSTLIN SBR 29 Macro 29 MAKE 15 MALLOC TRACE option 77 MAP command 65 MAPIDA 60 Master directory listing 89 Maximum modules 63 MDO 15 MEMORY command 65 Messages 102 MED 45 MMAP command 66 MODEM VUE parameter 94 MOVE command 67 page 119 N NARROW VUE command 92 O OCMPIL 15 OCTAL SET option 73 Octal values 29 ODTIM 27 OPR account defined 8 OPRE 15 OPRE command 68 Orientation 69 ORUN 15 Outfile 10 P PAD 33 Page breaks 49 PAGE command 68 Page mode 87 Parameter passing to SBX 33 Partition 8 65 Password 8 16 PFK modules 52 63 Phantom jobs 84 Platform
8. This combined with the fact that you can run QUTL from a command file provides a mechanism for nightly processing programs to check if any locks were left in use and optionally remove them either by zapping the queue entirely or just the user or by using the KILL LIT utility You must be logged into OPR in order to use the queue utility A Shell Command Reference page 77 RENAME RENAME lt out wildspec gt lt in wildspecl gt delete query RENAME renames files without moving them Parameters out wildspec may be a single file or a wildcard specification in wildspec may be a single file a wildcard specification or a comma delimited list of file or wildcard specifications delete is needed to overwrite the name of an existing output file whose contents would then be deleted query causes RENAME to prompt for a confirmation before renaming each of the input files Although RENAME appears to have the same syntax as COPY and MOVE it is restricted by the fact that the output file location must match the input file location This is normally used on files in the current directory eliminating the need to specify a device or PPN SAVE SAVE lt name ext gt delete SAVE like the AMOS counterpart saves a module from user memory to disk The delete switch is needed to overwrite an existing file page 78 A Shell Command Reference SEND SEND as of A Shell 4 6 applies to both Windows and UNIX an
9. gt page 109 IF ELSE ENDIF Statements These statements are similar to their BASIC Plus counterparts The following functions and expressions are supported by IF with the same syntax as for BASIC ABS ACS ASC ASN ATN CHR COS DATN DEVICE EXP FACT FIX FIX INSTR INT LCS LEFT LEN LEN LOG LOG10 LOOKUP MID RIGHT RND SGN SIN SPACE SQR STR TAN TIME UCS VAL The most useful of the above functions LOOKUP works slightly differently than the BASIC Plus equivalent Instead of returning the file size it always returns 1 if the file exists else 0 See the example in the Error Reference source not found file above The following relational operators are supported C smo Meaning O a y The following mathematical operators are supported Fe Subtraction Multiplication page 110 A Shell Command Reference GOTO and EXIT Statements GOTO is similar to the BASIC GOTO statement except that it can only jump forward in the CMD or DO file The syntax of a label consists of a semicolon followed by the label name See the label DONE in the sample Error Reference source not found file above EXIT causes an immediate exit to the A Shell command prompt even if you are currently nested multiple levels deep ina CMD or DO file LOOKUP Statement The LOOKUP statement is a variation of the LOOKUP function see IF statements above The syntax is LOOKUP lt fspec gt Optional message if not found If the specifie
10. to be equal to lt value gt It was added to A Shell in Build 923 of 15 March 2005 Some examples DEFINE TCRT REVON 32 page 106 A Shell Command Reference DEFINE XTF CTRLC amp h01000000 DEFINE MY NAMES JACK The names following the DEFINE must conform to the normal rules for variable names start with an alphabetic character and contain alphabetic numeric and apostrophe or underline characters plus an optional or suffix The definition must either be a literal numeric value as in the first two examples above or a quoted string value These definitions act like macros substituting the definition into the source code before each line of the program is compiled Because of this compiler error messages will usually display the line after macro expansions which may look strange at first but since the error messages also show the line number it allows you to compare your source code to the result after the macro replacements From a logic standpoint the result is equivalent to using MAP statements i e MAP1 TCRT REVON B 1 32 MAP1 XTF CTRLC B 4 amp h01000000 MAP1 MY NAMES S 4 JACK The main advantages of DEFINE over MAP statements are e You cannot assign a value to a DEFINEd symbol thus they act like true constants e DEFINEd constants take up no space in the RUN file unless they are used Thus it now becomes practical to create include files which define constant
11. D or query the status S of the ATE reverse channel The reverse channel is an optional second socket connection between the ATE client and the server used for the purpose of sending response information from the client to the server The reverse channel generally speeds up communication between the server and client and minimizes conflicts between keyboard activity and the other control information sent between the two machines When connected all non keyboard communication from the ATE client to the server is sent via the socket rather than sharing the stdin data stream with the keyboard The objective is to eliminate interference between keyboard data especially in the form of typeahead and control data such as result codes from INFLD and GUI operations There are two steps to activating the connection The first is to check the option Accept Connection From Server on the Misc tab of the ATE configuration dialog and enter an available port number that is visible by the server to the client requires ATE build 153 or higher A high numbered port above 20000 is recommended The second step is to execute ATECTL C from the dot prompt of the server after connecting Note that if there is a firewall between the server and client or you are running a software firewall in the ATE client you will need to open up the port you choose to connect on Also note that use of this connection is optional and can
12. DRAW GO RAE O O OOOO EE INSERT MODEM NARROW QUITWARN SEARCHFO ON OFF Forces VUE to start in the normal 24 row mode DISPLAY COMMAND END default 8 TALL Forces VUE to start in a display mode consisting of the specified number of rows or 42 if no argument given WIDE e SCSC SCS WRAP A Shell Command Reference page 99 AUTODELETE The AUTODELETE and UPDATE commands also available from Command Mode are similar to the d VUE commands of the same names The both relate to an optional feature in which an automatic update notation is added to the top of the file whenever you finish out of it The notation looks something like this Updated on 02 Oct 98 at 06 33 PM by Jack edit time 0 45 23 Appropriate default comment markers and or are determined on the basis of the file extension If the file extension is not recognized the feature is turned off If you prefer to define your own comment markers then use the UPDATE lt sc gt lt ec gt syntax where lt sc gt is the start comment sequence and lt ec gt is the optional end comment sequence When the UPDATE feature is active AUTODELETE may come in handy to automatically remove older entries so you do not accumulate an infinite number of them or have to manually remove them Setting it to ON results in just the last entry being preserved If you specify a number instead it will save that
13. PAGE TYPE lt file gt see the notes on PAGE TYPE will display control characters in caret notation i e using a printable character preceded by a For example nulls will display as escapes will display as etc Switches Page mode stops after each screen page Slow mode displays only 10 lines per second U U simply takes the command line which follows it and writes it to a command file called SYS U CMD so that it can be easily recalled later just by typing U For example U dir udate cdate adate bas run 0 After executing the above command you would then be able to enter just U lt Enter gt to execute the command dir udate cdate adate bas run 0 Since recording one command is of limited value given that you can use R to retrieve previously typed commands from the command history buffer you can make unlimited copies of the U LIT command under different names which will work the same way but which will record their command lines in the correspondingly named command files Example COPY U2 SYS U LIT U2 DIR UDATE CDATE ADATE The above would create a command file called U2 which could be later executed to execute the DIR UDATE CDATE ADATE command line page 94 A Shell Command Reference VERIFY VERIFY lt dir file spec gt F The VERIFY utility reads a previously created directory listing and compares it to the actual files reporting whether they ag
14. be whatever was previously occupying that disk space DATE TIME The A Shell implementations of DATE and TIME differ from AMOS in that it is only possible to display system date or time information and not to change it An attempt to set the date or time will result in the following message You must use the host operating system to reset the date or time page 106 A Shell Command Reference EL DEL lt spec gt unlock DEL under A Shell is nearly equivalent to the version under AMOS except that the A Shell version supports the unlock switch which is necessary to delete modules which have been loaded with the Lock switch DEVTBL DEVTBL displays the names of the defined A Shell devices This is essentially just a list of the DEVICE statements from the MIAME INI file You can use the PPN command on any of the defined devices to display the available PPNs on that device A Shell Command Reference page 105 DIFF SER eee DIFF listfile oldfile newfile switches UNIX only DIFF is a front end to the standard UNIX diff utility with is much faster and more powerful than the SRCCOM LIT utility Like the SRCCOM utility the standard version lists the lines that are different between the two specified files The differences between DIFF and SRCCOM are e DIFF ignores differences that are just white space i e a TAB and 3 spaces is treated as no different than a single space e DIFF has no switches although
15. commenting individual changes in a program and associating them with the program s edit number Use the Command Mode HELP command to get a complete list of all the available commands Update Notes Build 879 12 Apr 04 The following were added e Implement primitive bookmarks these are similar to the multiple push pop capability except that there is no concept of a hierarchy or stack SM creates a bookmark for the current line SN jumps to the next bookmark sC clears the bookmark from the current line The feature is handy when working on several sections in a large file and you want to jump between them e Implement the append macro feature _A e F formats the current paragraph Same as gt FORMAT A Shell Command Reference page 103 e UNIX standalone mode A new ini vue feature BAKDIR lt nativedirectory gt causes the BAK file to be put in the specified directory rather than in current directory This can help avoid confusion in cases where BAK files might not be recognized properly by other people or programs e standalone The display of the file path on the status line is now more intelligent expanding it out with the current dir info if not specified on the command line and trimming the first part of it if too long This is particularly helpful when simultaneously editing multiple copies of a file in different directories page 104 A Shell Command Reference WSET TRACKER is a Debug MicroSabio prod
16. execute these from the A Shell dot prompt just create a DO file which uses the HOST command e g HOST Ipstat t Also most UNIX variations have a menu driven or even GUI utility for doing these kinds of things QUTL A Shell on multi user systems and even stand alone uses a queue file qflock sys in which to store information which may be shared by multiple users This file is in the form of a linked list analogous to the AMOS queue blocks system and is used by the FLOCK and XLOCK subroutines The QUTL command is primarily intended to give some control over the FLOCK and XLOCK locks present on the system by reading and processing the queue file It can display which users currently have locks and is also able to re initialize the XLOCK and FLOCK queue lists a process which normally requires a machine reset under AMOS or some specially written assembly language routines QUTL may also be used to zap a logged on A Shell user This will remove all locks and queue blocks associated with that user and although the user may continue to be able run whatever program they are in as soon as it attempts to make an XLOCK or FLOCK call or when it exits back to the dot prompt it will see that it has been removed from the queue and will abort with an appropriately cryptic error message Something like your queue file has been zapped When used to list the existing XLOCKs and or FLOCKs QUTL provides an option to output the list to a file
17. for examples TELNET TELNET lt connection gt Windows only TELNET launches ATE the A Shell Terminal Emulator to establish a session with the specified connection The connection name must have been previously defined using ATECFG which see You can terminate the session either from the remote host i e by logging out or by entering D vertical bar D page 92 A Shell Command Reference TELSER TELSER lt port gt lt startup command gt switches Windows only TELSER allows you to turn your current A Shell Windows session into a single client telnet server That is it proceeds to listen on the specified port for a standard telnet client connection at which point the remote telnet client takes over the session This is a rather advanced or perhaps obscure capability which is mainly of use for remote support sort of like pcAnywhere or for environments where your application was written to depend on the capabilities of a particular terminal emulator Switches s Display waiting window on task bar otherwise it becomes invisible T tdv Forces the client connection to use the specified terminal driver Otherwise it will negotiate the terminal type with the client terminal emulator A Shell Command Reference page 93 TYPE ESE TYPE lt filespec gt switches TYPE displays the specified file on the screen similar to the cat utility under UNIX TYPE lt file gt P is functionally equivalent to
18. if you specify more ARG variables in the XGETARGS statement then were passed by the caller the excess ARG variables are ignored In either case the operation is non destructive to the original argument list so you can later go back and retrieve or re retrieve parameters using XGETARGS XGETARG or the original MIAMEX MX XCBDATA statements XGETARG ARGNO ARG performs the same function as XGETARGS except that it retrieves only the one argument whose number is specified in ARGNO XPUTARG ARGNO ARG is the reverse of XGETARG It returns the value of the argument ARG into the caller s argument number ARGNO Note that in the case of XPUTARG the ARG can be a variable or an expression whereas in the case of XGETARGS or XGETARG the arguments must be variables You can t retrieve an argument into an expression but you can use an expression to return an argument Type conversions will be made as appropriate if the variable types do not match the types passed to the xcall but it behooves you to use appropriate data types for the circumstances The following examples may clarify the equivalencies between the new statements and the old MIAMEX MX_XCBDATA calls XGETARGS P1 P2 P3 P4 is equivalent to xcall MIAMEX MX XCBDATA XCBADR XCBGET xcall MIAMEX MX XCBDATA XCBADR XCBGET xcall MIAMEX MX XCBDATA XCBADR XCBGET xcall MIAMEX MX XCBDATA XCBADR XCBGET ply PL p2yP2Z 73 P3 74 P4 Fl Fl EE Fi and is also e
19. instructions on achieving this or on setting the SETUID bit on ashkill so that it runs with root privileges Under Windows KILL uses the A Shell Inter Job Communication IJC system to send a message to the target job effectively telling it in as friendly a manner as possible to go kill itself As with the UNIX version described above the K switch determines how lethal the operation is Without K it is basically no different than a Control C which may be trapped by the program or ignored entirely With K the instructions are to abort anything that is running even VUE It is nice enough to save the file first though Ifa BASIC program is running at the time it will be aborted with error 251 which can be trapped but only temporarily because as soon as the program goes into a keyboard operation it will terminated without any further delay Note that the IJC system clock frequency is established by the IJCFREQ parameter in MIAME INI page 68 A Shell Command Reference LICENS LICENS ATESRV LICENS provides the means to display your A Shell license information and to optionally update that information Other methods of updating the license are to edit the MIAME INI file directly and to respond to the prompt which appears on startup if your license has expired When executed LICENS displays information about the current license similar to the ABOUT command and asks if you want to update the license It then promp
20. list of default INFLD codes previously only able to be set via the miame ini SBR INFDEF statement Syntax SET INFDEF display SET INFDEF lt codes gt replace current defaults with lt codes gt xcall MIAMEX 143 OP INFDEF allows the same capability from within a program MX INFDEF is defined as 143 in ashell bsi edit 103 OP is a numeric argument if 0 the current default type codes are returned in the INFDEF parameter otherwise the current default type codes are replaced by those in the INFDEF string The maximum size of the default string is currently 36 This feature is of course handy for experimenting with global INFLD TYPE codes within a single job without interfering with other jobs It may also be useful for changing the defaults with a single program Note that for a particular INFLD call you can disable the default TYPE codes by adding m to the TYPE parameter passed to INFLD LOKSER This turns on and off LOKSER This provides the same functionality as the LOKSER ON OFF statement in the miame ini file but can be used without exiting and re entering A Shell as would be required to modify miame ini A Shell Command Reference page 81 STRICT The STRICT function was added to A Shell in build 859 4 14 Jan 2004 SET LIT 1 2 135 allows you to turn the STRICT option on and off This may be convenient in CMD files if you only want STRICT mode for certain operations TERMINAL options A She
21. many entries before deleting older ones See the notes on Special Commands for information about the related SE and _E commands AUTOSAVE This causes the file to be automatically saved after the specified number of changes are made during an edit session Single character operations are counted each as one change more complicated operations e g replace line and word delete block operations etc are arbitrarily counted as five changes A reasonable number might be something in the vicinity of 1000 A value of 0 disables the operation To aggravate your mates and waste a lot of resources you can set the value to 1 When triggered the file is saved exactly as if a manual SAVE command had been issued Note that even after several such SAVE operations you can still recover your original file by using QUIT to exit and then making a copy of the BAK file e g COPY MYFILE OLD MYFILE BAK COLOFFSET The COLOFFSET command both at the command level and in INI VUE adjusts the starting column number By default VUE calls the first column 0 If you want the first column to be numbered 1 then use gt COLOFFSET 1 at the VUE prompt or add COLOFFSET 1 to INI VUE This was added to A Shell in Build 938 of 25 August 2005 CVTWARN This controls whether you get a warning that it will convert the CRLF line terminators AMOS Windows format to native format terminators LF for UNIX page 100 A Shell Command Reference DRAW This cont
22. or you can specify a printer name that is recognizable by Windows i e the type that appear underneath the printer icons In these last cases there will be no printer initialization file and a default configuration consisting of PASSTHROUGH OFF and PITCH AUTO will be used A Shell does not include an internal implementation of the spooler and instead uses the natural spooler for the host operating system Thus the precise effect of most of the option switches described will vary from one operating system to the next See the A Shell Setup Guide for more information on printer configuration NO BANNER Controls whether a banner is sent at the start of the printout Under Windows this has no effect Under most UNIX versions the default spooler behavior is to force a banner regardless unless the option to request no banner has been specifically enabled with something like usr lib lpadmin p lt ptr gt onobanner COPIES Specify number of copies of file to print NO DELETE Controls whether the file is deleted after printing NO FF Controls whether a formfeed is sent after the last page NO HEADER Controls whether a header is printed at the top of each page indicating the filename time date and page number Since this feature is not offered by most non AMOS spoolers the A Shell PRINT command has to simulate it by creating a temporary file with the headers and then spooling that file in place of the original NO LANDSCAP
23. parameter to refer to the name of the batch or script file itself rather than the first user argument Since the space is used as a token delimiter a special trick is needed to create a single argument that contains a space Angle brackets may be used for this purpose to combine multiple tokens into a single argument For example in the following command line DO MAIN 22 lt GL OPTION1 OPTION2 gt GL OPTION OPTION2 will be treated as 1 To establish default values for arguments which are not specified on the command line the DO file can begin with the special command D followed by the defaults for 0 1 etc Arguments not specified in this list will have no default You can also specifically skip over a default argument by inserting just a in the argument s position on the D line For example SD DEFO DEF2 This would set the default for 0 to DEFO the default for 1 to nothing and the default for 2 to DEF2 The D command if present must be on the first line of the DO file page 108 A Shell Command Reference Comments The comment character is the semicolon unlike UNIX which uses the pound sign and DOS which uses REM The comment character may appear anywhere in the command line with the exception that labels which have the same syntax as a one word comment must start in column one See the line DONE in the sample file Error Reference source not found above
24. send a request for that format to MicroSabio A Shell Command Reference page 3 Legal Notice This documentation and the software it describes contain proprietary information belonging to MicroSabio a California proprietorship owned entirely by Jack McGregor The software and this related information is provided under a license agreement containing restrictions on use and disclosure and is protected by copyright law This information is confidential between MicroSabio and the client and remains the exclusive property of MicroSabio Due to continued product development the information contained herein may change without notice It is believed to be accurate and reliable at least at the time of its writing However no responsibility for the accuracy completeness or use of this information is assumed by MicroSabio If you find any problems in the documentation please report them to the publisher No part of this publication may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic mechanical photocopying recording or otherwise without the expressed or licensed permission of MicroSabio Trademarks MicroSabio A Shell INMEMO INFLD and EZ SPOOL are trademarks of Jack McGregor AIX and Informix are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation Alpha Micro AMOS and AlphaBASIC are registered trademarks of Alpha Micro Products Inc HP UX is a trademark of the Hewlett
25. specified due to the addition of a control byte This and the fact that the file grows on a record by record basis unlike the AMOS version which is preallocated in blocks makes even the data files as well as the IDX files not binary compatible between AMOS and A Shell To move them between platforms you have to either use ISMUTL to dump on the source platform and then ISMUTL again to reload from the dump file on the target platform or you can create a program in BASIC which reconstructs the file from the existing IDA or DAT file directly albeit with some programming difficulty JSTAT JSTAT lt jobname gt JSTAT is useful for monitoring the status and activity of another job It displays a dynamically updated screen full of information such as the number of reads writes and basic instructions both total and rate sec over the last sampling interval It also shows the last basic instruction last xcall last line number current PPN program job status flags etc This can be useful in a variety of circumstances such as debugging a job that appears to be in an infinite loop or determining whether operator is actively keypunching or a remote job is safe to kill As with other utilities that rely on inter job communication such as KILL FORCE and SEND there are privilege issues to consider under UNIX Linux whereas under Windows the main issue is the IJCFREQ setting in the MIAME INI Refer to the A Shell Setup Guide UNIX installatio
26. to use a different A Shell configuration file than the parent process Note that the inifile name should be a native file specification and must be enclosed in quotes to prevent the slashes in the file spec from being confused with switches L logfile UNIX only Overrides the default log file name Specify an AMOS type filename A Shell Command Reference page 87 Jjobname_ Functions just like the j switch to A Shell allows you to give the background process a specific name Otherwise a name of the form TASxxx TASAAA TASAAB will be generated automatically BA buffile Activates the auto snapshot feature of INFLD and appends each snapshot to the specified file The default file extension is BUF and the default location is MEMO 1 1 if it exists or the current login directory where the first snapshot occurs Works internally by passing the ba lt buffile gt switch to the child A Shell process and by adding the S type code to the INFDEF default INFLD parameter string BC buffile Same as the BA option except creates a new snapshot buffer file overwriting any existing one IW UNIX only Wait for the submitted process to complete This may seem to defeat the purpose of running a process in background but can be useful either when the main objective is to look at the LOG file or when you want to run processes that otherwise would not accept input from a command file K seqno UNIX only Kill a proces
27. use LOAD to load modules into user memory they do not actually take up space in the partition set by the MEMORY command Instead space is dynamically allocated for loaded modules This is also true of a number of other memory allocations such as temporary memory needed to load an SBX subroutine or for use in sorting Thus it is likely that you can get by with a smaller partition under A Shell than you needed under AMOS On the other hand memory is cheap so why worry about it page 72 A Shell Command Reference MMAP Documentation update June 2004 MMAP 1 0 100 was added to A Shell in build 851 05 Oct 03 MMAP 1 Using the above format MMAP displays or with L outputs to MMAP LST the current list of files to be automatically memory mapped MMAP lt new mmap fspec gt Using the second format MMAP replaces the current memory map list with the one contained in new mmap fspec The format of the list consists of one AMOS filespec per line the same as for MMAPLIST statement in MIAME INI file A Shell Command Reference page 73 MOVE MOVE lt out wildspec gt lt in wildspecl gt delete query UNIX only MOVE moves files from one place or name to another This is similar to copying the file and then erasing the source file except that it is implemented as a wrapper for the UNIX mv command which is why it only works there MOVE is much more efficient than COPY followed by ERASE since it moves only the dir
28. you are welcome to add your own e DIFF uses the UNIX like space delimiter to separate the two filespec arguments rather than a comma as comma space to separate the files e DIFF displays its output in the EZTYP viewer rather than just outputting to the screen Since DIFF is simply a front end to the UNIX diff and since source code is provided in the 7 376 directory you can easily modify it to take advantage of other features supported in the UNIX diff See the diff man page for details The only switch currently supported is w which causes DIFF to ignore differences comprising white space only If you create your own variation of DIFF LIT it is recommended that you rename it in order to avoid having it be overwritten by a subsequent update DING DING lt number of times gt DING rings the bell This sophisticated technique is mainly used within CMD and DO files to get the operator s attention perhaps because input is required or an error has occurred Under Windows and most terminal emulators such as ZTERM this will play the System Default sound You can change the WAV file associated with that sound from the Sound applet of your Control Panel no doubt amazing and delighting your colleagues by setting it to a shrieking woman theme from Thus Spake Zarathustra or a gastronomic by function If you do not have a sound card or are using a dumb terminal you will be at the mercy of the default hardware bell sou
29. 0 22 DATE This numeric dot variable returns the date in the same numeric format as the standard AlphaBASIC DATE system variable i e 3 byte separated format DEVICE This dot variable evaluates to the user s current device e g DSKO EXPERIENCE This dot variable evaluates to the numeric value 100 since experience level is not one of the AMOS job attributes that is emulated under A Shell JOBNAME This dot variable evaluates to the jobname MONTH This dot variable evaluates to the 3 character abbreviation for the current month PGMNAME This dot variable evaluates to the current program name PGMVERSION This dot variable evaluates to the current program version e g 1 2A 100 TERMINAL This dot variable evaluates to the current TRMDEF name TIME The dot variable evaluates to the current time in HHMMSS format USERNAME This dot variable evaluates to the user name YYMMDD This dot variable evaluates to the current date in YYMMDD string format WHEN WEND WHEN lt condition gt statements WEND Note that WHEN is treated as interchangeable with the BASIC Plus IF and WEND as interchangeable with ENDIF page 106 A Shell Command Reference COPY COPY copies files from one place or name to another COPY lt out wildspec gt lt in wildspecl gt delete query Parameters out wildspec m
30. 4 5 6 7 8 9 ERASE 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 EXIT SYNTAX lt Usage MOVE dest source Note required space on either side of gt EXIT page 74 A Shell Command Reference PAGE PAGE lt command line gt The PAGE command can be used as a prefix to any other non screen oriented command to causes its output to be displayed one page at a time instead of scrolling It stops after each screen full of output and waits for any key to proceed For example PAGE DUMP FILE TXT This will dump the contents of the file a page at a time General paging may also be turned on and off by using PAGE ON and PAGE OFF This command can be extremely useful when dealing with rapidly outputting commands such as TYPE DIR DUMP and COMPIL You can terminate the command by entering Q when prompted to proceed to the next page PRE OPRE Originally AlphaBASIC did not contain an include file facility now achieved with include To get around this problem a pre compiler was developed and is in use by many dealers today particularly in the UK This pre compiler uses COPY to indicate a file to be included in exactly the same way The difference is that COPY statements may be nested whereas include statements may not The pre compiler generates an intermediate file PRE which contains the expanded source and which is then normally compiled automatically and erased It may be left on disk however by spe
31. 4K Furthermore like with the A switch which is implied by AV unless OPTIONS STRICT the compiler will automatically restart the compilation using AV if the page 106 A Shell Command Reference program would exceed the 64K variable index limit Normal variables require 10 bytes of indexing space each array variables take more so this limited programs to something less than 6400 variables With AV the limit becomes 256 times greater AV is independent of other compiler switches except A so you don t need to go to BasicPlus mode but any RUN file thus compiled will not be compatible with AMOS nor with any version of A Shell prior to 4 9 857 You will get the error RUN file is in an incompatible format if you try to run such a program under AMOS or an earlier A Shell The AV switch was added in version 1 0 112 A Shell Build 857 of 23 December 03 Beginning with COMPIL version 1 0 112 A Shell Build 859 of 14 Jan 04 COMPIL invokes AV automatically only if STRICT is not set B Background mode Sends all sends all error messages to the file lt sourcefile gt lst instead of the screen The format of each message is lt filename gt lt line gt lt error message gt lt source line gt This switch was introduced in COMPIL LIT 1 0 114 A Shell build 902 of 27 September 2004 In COMPIL 1 4 and COMPLP BASIC Plus modes causes ISAM 1 0 statements to be accepted and in the case of ambiguous open statements
32. A Shell Command Reference Copyright 2005 Jack McGregor All rights reserved This edition was produced on 31 August 2005 Publisher MicroSabio 22704 Ventura Blvd 476 Woodland Hills CA 91364 USA Web site www microsabio com Email info microsabio com voice 818 710 8437 fax 818 704 4882 Authors Jack McGregor has been developing and documenting A Shell since 1994 and his authorship continues through the date of this publication Ty Griffin is responsible for editing formating and publishing this document in its various forms Related Information This document contains the most up to date information that was available at the time of publication It is part of the overall A Shell documentation set which consists of the following major components e Set Up Guide e Command Reference e Development Guide e XCALL Reference e Update Notes Other related materials include the A Shell Telnet Service Guide the A Shell COM Interface Reference and the Ashlite Program Reference All of these publications in various formats are available from the MicroSabio web site documents page Additional information about A Shell may be included in files that accompany the distributed i e installation copies of the software The documents in the A Shell collection are available in multiple formats HTML Windows Help CHM and PDF to name the most common If you do not easily find the document format you prefer please
33. DATE Displays last access date ATIME Displays last access time A Shell Command Reference page 105 CDATE Displays file c date CONTIGUOUS Displays a C to identify contiguous files Note that under A Shell this really just means the file is a multiple of 512 bytes CTIME Displays file c time Usually used with CDATE See notes under CDATE for differences between the c date under AMOS Windows and UNIX DATA Displays complete filespecs See VERIFY for notes on a use for this switch Display file update last modified dates CDATE Displays file c date The c date under AMOS and Windows is the creation date but under UNIX is the date that the file s directory entry was last changed This occurs whenever the file ownership or privileges are changed or when a symbolic link is created or when the file is moved renamed or copied Because of this the c date can easily be more recent than the update date LONG Changes the default display layout to accommodate 10 3 format instead of 6 3 format It also changes the default W value from 4 columns to 3 As before filenames exceeding the maximum display length will show a gt character following the filename Note that the SET command LONGDIR can be used to force the 10 3 format This switch was added in DIR LIT version 3 0 132 A Shell build 897 0 of 10 August 2004 page 106 A Shell Command Reference DO DO lt fsp
34. E Windows only Overrides the ORIENTATION parameter in the printer ini file LPP When used in conjunction with the HEADER option defines the number of lines printed per page MARGIN When used in conjunction with the HEADER option defines a left margin size NO PASSTHROUGH Controls whether the file is sent raw to the printer or is allowed to be cooked by the printer driver Refer to the A Shell Setup Guide for more information on this important topic page 76 A Shell Command Reference PREFIX fspec Allows you to specify a file that will be prepended as a prefix to the file you are printing overriding any PREFIX option specified in the printer INI QUERY Standard CMDLIN switch causes each matching filename to be displayed and the user given a Y N choice of whether to print that file SUFFIX fspec Allows you to specify a file that will be appended as a suffix to the file you are printing override any SUFFIX option specified in the printer INI WIDTH When used in conjunction with the HEADER option defines the position of the Page at the right side of the page header The technique for displaying the print queue and canceling a printout varies from one operating system to the next Under Windows you just use the Print Manager generally accessible by double clicking on the printer icon in the system tray at the end of the task bar Under Linux the typical equivalents are Ipq and Iprm To
35. EATE allocates and fills a file with the specified number of 512 byte blocks Under AMOS random or contiguous files are actually different in structure from the normal sequential files and as the name implies are allocated in contiguous space Under Windows and UNIX there is no equivalent concept nor is there a need for one All data files can be accessed using either the random access method or the sequential method In fact a file allocated with CREATE could later be accessed as if it were a sequential file Since there is no perfect way to recognize whether an existing file was created with CREATE and thus should be treated as a random file or via a sequential output process A Shell can only guess based on whether the file size is a perfect multiple of 512 bytes If so there is a very good likelihood that it was intended to be a random file If not then it must be a sequential file The only significance of this decision is for the DIR F operation which indicates contiguous files with a C and for the BASIC LOOKUP statement which by default returns a negative number to indicate random or contiguous files The MIAME INI setting OPTIONS ABSLOOKUP eliminates that distinction causing all files to be reported as positive numbers The OPTIONS BRKALLC switch in the MIAME INI affects what the newly allocated file is pre filled with When set the file is filled with brackets Otherwise the contents will
36. HEN statements ENDIF String editing function The FILL function copies the given expression partially or multiple times up to the specified length Day Time output conversion formatting File open mode modifier Enhancement to OPEN CH FSPEC APPEND Integer variable type Execute AMOS commands as subroutines Input a character Retrieve command line Determine how to handle divide by zero Compiler directives Similar to LOOKUP statement but returns file size as value of expression Note that a zero block file returns 0 5 Returns the text of the BASIC error message associated with the specified BASIC error number from the SYS ERRMSG xxx file Returns a string identical to var except with all of the trailing spaces removed Raw input from file channel or keyboard into X variables The ability to pass command line arguments in a chain statement is supported in all compiler modes by A Shell These new file type specifiers may be used in file OPEN statements to clarify if the file is to be handled as ISAM 1 0 or ISAMPLUS See I switch above Note that this applies to AlphaBASIC 1 4 as well as BASIC Plus Specifying literal values in an alternate radix Define a symbolic constant page 105 Do While Until Loop DO WHILE or UNTIL condition statements LOOP WHILE or UNTIL condition For example DO WHILE A gt B A A 1 B B 2 LOOP Another example DO A A 1 LOOP UNTIL A 10 For
37. Move a file UNIX Linux only ORUN Run AlphaBASIC 1 3 or 1 4 program same as RUN Sends files wildcard spec to a spooler PWD page 106 A Shell Command Reference commana cis Fuon OOO O TAIL Display or copy last N lines of a text file TYPE U ZTERM utility Transfer file to PC and launch app A Shell Command Reference page 105 ABOUT ABOUT 1 ABOUT displays information about your license The L switch causes the output to written to the file ABOUT LST instead of the screen The output looks like this A Shell1 32 Windows 32 Ver Serial Licensed to odes Licensed odes in Use Jobs in Use License Options Release Date aintenance Expiration INI File Key JOBTBL SYS File Spec Created 4 9 922 3 4681 MicroSabio In House 5 1 1 D Isam ATS ATE COM XCALL W32I0 6 Mar 2005 8 Jun 2006 c vm miame miame ini OGJID 5302 UYZ 478392 8C78FHXO c vm miame jobtbl sys 07 Mar 05 16 26 Details of the software about the software license are also available from and may be changed with the LICENS command page 106 A Shell Command Reference APPEND APPEND switches lt outfile gt lt infilel gt lt infile2 gt APPEND creates a file consisting of two or more input files concatenated together Ignore Causes nonexistent input files to be ignored Otherwise a missing file would cause the operation to abort an end of file marker which can cause all ki
38. PNs to arbitrary native directories see the A Shell Setup Guide for more details A Shell Command Reference page 11 System Command Syntax The general syntax of an A Shell system command line is lt command name gt switches arguments switches or in the case of many commands that operate on files and or which accept wildcard filespecs lt command name gt lt outfile gt wildcard list switches lt Angular brackets gt are used in these syntax examples to indicate a token that must be replaced while curly brackets indicate items that may be replaced i e are optional So in the example above lt outfile gt indicates an optional term if specified lt outfile gt must be replaced with an actual argument such as MYFILE TXT The command name e g COPY is never case sensitive and is generally given as just the name without the extension or the directory location Specifying more than just the name may alter the search path which see below If the command takes arguments they are usually not case sensitive but this could be up to the discretion of the command implementation Switches are always preceded by a forward slash and are virtually never case sensitive In most cases the switch may be abbreviated to the minimum number of unique characters for that command For example many commands support the switch query which can usually be abbreviated to g In some cases switches may precede the arguments but t
39. Packard Company Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation Red Hat is a trademark of Red Hat Inc UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group ZTERM is a trademark of Rod Hewitt at Cool stf All other products services companies events and publications are trademarks registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners page 4 A Shell Command Reference Contents Updates cen ae Vase ve shea Reard bets ores aed vege Ra bese A adade eo Rae eh eee ete 7 Comimand Processini gis deroat a a a a n sedges aaa Chane sult a ena aoi a a ae Be 9 Fil spees and DIC tOr S a a E E a cus 10 Mapping Files pers r e e a a cane e A a E E Ea Ea aa Aa EA aE E S 11 System Command Syntax insasi eiveashicbeancreheccacanegean cadavesactiabeanegeecshoeoagencedstiaschdabeamsnedecdaszeasuancudevteetes 12 Command Search Path urnaretra T N R 13 Binary Compatibility a a ch as A esas Mh a RR cadens 13 Wildcard Commands ss ccc 2a ci enh ee eee Rh ae Ge eR ae deh ee aE 14 Native Filesp cs2tsasasscitiasctelihsaecdetatedbens Fores E cag vadesdetacat saluava closer aia doresotasteeluena conan 14 Command Line Editing and Recall c cc cccccsecsseesteceeceseceseceseeeeceeeeeeeeceaecsaecsaecesecesecnaeesereneeesnneeags 15 TAT COM MANS ETETE EATA Sede eae an E R sages cap TEE ETN 17 CMB and DO Biles e EEA aa sated dade Paes aS ged te adeaa ote toes ee
40. The output looks something like this hopefully DSKO ABOUT LIT 1 4 VERIFIED DSKO APPEND LIT 1 4 VERIFIED DSKO ASTAT LIT 1 4 VERIFIED DSKO ATECFG LIT 1 4 VERIFIED DSKO C LIT 1 4 VERIFIED DSKO CHAT LIT 1 4 VERIFIED DSKO CLS LIT 1 4 VERIFIED If the version or hash of the actual file does not match that recorded in the directory listing it will report the discrepancy for example DSKO DIR LIT 1 4 Version mismatch is 1 5 125 MDL 1 5 124 A Shell Command Reference page 95 This would indicate that the actual version of the file DIR LIT is 1 5 125 while the release version as recorded in the directory listing is 1 5 124 MDL stands for Master Directory Listing page 96 A Shell Command Reference VERSYS Documentation update June 2004 see Update Notes below VERSYS lt wildspec gt The VERSYS displays version and resource information associated with an A Shell LIT program that relates to the environment in which it was created For example VERSYS DIR I DIR LIT A Shell Version amp System Information File Version 1 5 125 System Resource ashell 74 System Resource cmdlin 24 max devs 300 max ppns 512 The file version can also be gotten from the DIR V command But DIR V cannot tell you the details about the ashell and cmdlin resource files which were used to compile this copy of DIR Periodically
41. The values of the variables g0 through g9 all of them optional all of them string or unformatted will be plugged into the corresponding global parameters Any of the parameters g0 through g9 that are not specified will cause the corresponding variable to be cleared Status F 6 will be returned as 0 for success else error See the sample program MIAMEX BAS in 7 376 for an example of setting and even retrieving these global DO parameters Although they were designed to be used with DO files there is nothing stopping you from using them for holding and passing parameters amongst your own programs A Shell Command Reference page 113 KO K9 Commands This capability was added to A Shell in build 909 7 of 19 December 2004 The CMD DO file processor now supports a variation of the K command to input keyboard responses into variables which can tested in IF statements and used as DO file parameters The following sample CMD file provides an example iR lt Enter desired ppn gt AN E Enter password gt SKBDO SECRET LOG SKBDO The special command KO is like K in that it waits for a line of input but instead of passing the input to the current program it simply stores it as KBDO The same concept applies to K1 thru K2 KBD1 thru KBD9 The special KBDn variables may be tested in an IF statement or passed as a command line argument to a DO file Note that when using KBDn in an IF statement it
42. UNIX the line terminator is a single n or LF character Under AMOS and Windows a CR LF character pair is used VUE is the only A Shell module which under UNIX will automatically convert from the either format and will always save files in the current native format page 102 A Shell Command Reference Special Commands A Shell Vue is mainly intended for the convenience of those already familiar with some other version of VUE e g AlphaVue XED or d VUE Since the A Shell Vue supports mainly just the core subset of features that most people use there did not seem to be much need to document it in detail here However there are a few editing features that are either non standard extensions or just plain exotic such that many people are not aware of them Since it would be a shame to live without these features they are hereby revealed Push Pop Although these are supported in virtually all other versions of VUE A Shell Vue offers a useful enhancement on the idea by providing a stack of up to 10 push pop locations The standard PUSH and POP commands access this stack in the usual LIFO fashion but if you specify a numeric stack location e g gt PUSH 5 it uses that entry directly Thus is becomes something more like a bookmark Note that whenever you directly access the push pop stack this way it resets the stack pointer to that location which will affect the operation of any subsequent unadorned PUSH or POP comman
43. a AS ER 107 Arguments 0 through 9 ssinsstsasachdeniatnecteecdersdannstivesudbe casdiicrad Qdansadnuineshsvessate RA a a aaaea eeta iiaa 108 Comment eana e a aa a aa a wa aes Cadets yo A ee ad eats E 109 Colon Commiands E e a ivi es ose ines white keen aaraa ta eE Era aes ta tte San ietin lass 109 IF ELSE ENDIF Statements 20 0 0 ccccccccssscccecssscececssssecccnsssececssssesccssssescesssseecesssseeecssseseneesaes 110 GOTO and EXIT Statements eo a EE E A dea vos A a e ee E EAA 111 HOOKUP Statement orrore a ean oe E AE a a aE O ote oaoa iait 111 Salte EAT nEle ERARA EE A AA T 112 Global DO File Parameters oea a E N sos dated a A 113 KOS ROCONI S aer e A E A tidtawctveemiedd 114 Jiao E A CAS Cs essed ees ETE A E E E E A tate 115 Concatenate ge Ei BAN E E EE E EE E E E E E EAT 116 TAG E I EN POEA ENEE NE NEEN EN EEA EEI AN E ENER END N EENE ER EE EEA T 117 A Shell Command Reference page 5 Updates Listed below are descriptions of the changes to the documentation and A Shell that have occurred since the release of A Shell 4 8 in October 2003 910 3 Jan 05 ara Add ability to Concatenate Parameters 910 3 Jan 05 ATECTL Add new command for ATE reverse channel 909 19 Dec 04 Sas Implement KO K9 Command and Input Case 97 10 Augo4 or adaton swen A Shell Command Reference page 7 864 04 Feb 04 D0 increase max expanded DO fe to about 122K Maximum modules per job now 96 from 32 page 8 A Shell Comm
44. and A Shell Note however that ISAMPLUS is not supported by OCMPIL COMPLP is equivalent to COMPIL except that it also supports some of the AlphaBASIC Plus extensions such as DO WHILE LOOP UNTIL IF ELSE ENDIF etc This is equivalent to adding the X 1 switch to either COMPIL or OCMPIL You would need to use OCMPIL lt prog gt X 1 or COMPLP lt prog gt I in order to use ISAM 1 0 The include command is fully implemented As its argument it may take either an AMOS format file specification or a host machine pathname enabling AlphaBASIC to be used as a true host machine development language The A Shell linked compiler makes use of available memory specified with the MIAME MEMORY command as its work space An Out of memory error thus implies that this value is insufficient See the description of the host operating system COMPIL command for notes relating to memory A Shell Command Reference page 105 Switches The complete list of support switches is provided below Note that when executing the compiler from the host operating system command level the switches must begin with a dash precede the filename and be lower case When being executed from the A Shell dot prompt they should begin with a slash and follow the filename Note that there several switches supported by A Shell which are not supported by AMOS AV S DB V 1 RC X 2 and X 3 Increase size of offsets used for program addresses from 16 to 24 bit
45. and Reference Command Processing Although A Shell is primarily an application development and runtime environment it also contains an emulation of the AMOS monitor mode aka dot prompt for the benefit of applications developers and users that rely on monitor mode for auxiliary operations Examples of such operations include copying and erasing files creating PPNs performing maintenance on ISAM files getting system status building function key translation tables displaying directory listings dumping files and logging to different PPNs and of course running compiling and editing programs The operations just described are all implemented via program files which under both AMOS and A Shell have the extension LIT and are thus sometimes referred to as LIT commands Under AMOS the LIT name was thought to derive from the idea that these were literal commands i e machine language to be executed literally by the CPU as opposed to commands that are interpreted by some higher level software like BASIC programs Under A Shell they are implemented in BASIC and thus the LIT extension may be a bit misleading but we decided to stick with it nonetheless since the distinction is no longer relevant Some of the A Shell LIT commands are essentially replacements for existing host operating system utilities e g COPY DIR ERASE but others are so AMOS or A Shell oriented that there would be no host operating system equiva
46. and line you can re execute it just by hitting ENTER If instead of just re executing it as is you prefer to edit it first you can do so using the following keystrokes Cowon Move cursortopreviousword SSCS Control Abort the current line start a new one Control L Right Move cursor to the right arrow Cowan Move cursorto meenamen Gontroka __ Toggle insertreplace mode Cycle forward through the previously typed 10 command lines after Down having used Control R to go backwards GonirokU Move cursortostar of commanding SSSSCS S Y Control W o Move cursor to next word Control Y P Delete line to the right of the cursor A Shell Command Reference page 15 LIT Commands The table below shows the LIT commands that are included A Shell and most of them are described in detail in the following sections An asterisk in the Class column below indicates that the command will accept wildcards Note that many of the commands will display usage information if invoked with a Switch command css Funo OO O O ATECFG Configure A Shell Terminal Emulator Windows only CHAT UNIX only Full screen dialog between two users DIFF UNIX only Compare two source files A Shell Command Reference page 105 command css Funn OO O OO er __ Usedinternaly byA Shol SSSCSC S S HEAD Display or copy first N lines of a text file F KILL UNIX only Terminate another process MOVE
47. ay be a single file or a wildcard specification in wildspec may be a single file a wildcard specification or a comma delimited list of file or wildcard specifications delete is needed to overwrite an existing output file query switch causes COPY to prompt for a confirmation before copying each of the input files Examples The following example simply makes a copy of FILE1 NEW called FILE1 OLD overwriting an existing FILE1 OLD if necessary COPY FILE1 OLD FILE1 NEW D This example copies the specified file from the SYS directory to the current directory COPY SYS ERSATZ INI This makes copy of all of the files with BAS extensions in all of the PPNs of the current device logical unit plus the file DSK1 DIRECT LST The copies will all be in the current PPN and will all have SAV extensions COPY SAV BAS DSK1 DIRECT LST The following demonstrates the ability to create new directories as needed while copying files It copies all of the files from DSKO 50 to the corresponding PPN in DSK1 Note that the ability to create new directories during the COPY operation is only available if you are currently logged into 1 2 Furthermore if the OPTIONS STRICT setting is specified in the miame ini then you may not create files during a COPY command outside of the current project COPY DSK1 DSKO 50 A Shell Command Reference page 105 CREATE CREATE lt file gt lt blocks gt CR
48. be activated at runtime by using SET DEBUG DIMX Enhanced dynamic array allocation DPRINT Like PRINT but creates a static text control using the current default GUI proportional font and with the sunken attribute Note that if the X 2 switch not specified TPRINT is compiled as PRINT Intended for displaying data fields INPUT CSV Input comma separated values Same as DPRINT but without the sunken effect Also note that SET AUTOTPRINT causes all PRINT statements to behave at runtime as if they were compiled as TPRINT RETURN lt expression gt Return value from XFUNC WRITECD Output comma delimited values WRITETD Same as WRITECD except that it outputs TAB delimiters instead of comma delimiters XFUNC Call an external SBX function XGETARG XGETARGS Retrieve XCALL params See XGETARG XGETARGS XPUTARG XPUTARG Return XCALL params See XGETARG XGETARGS XPUTARG Underlines in variable names Variable names and constants may contain underlines Although this has no special meaning by convention it is used primarily with constants DIMX DIMX was added to A Shell in Build 931 of 22 May 2005 DIMX Anyname exprl exprn type sizeexpr Examples DIM XTDATA COUNT S XTLEN DIM XTDATA COUNT1 A B C DIMX is an enhanced version of the venerable DIM statement used to allocate an array at runtime The enhancements of DIMX over DIM are A Shell Command Reference page 105 e It accepts optional typ
49. ch faster and more flexible but requires a small license fee contact us for details ATE Logs details of the GUI commands and responses sent between a server and an ATE client Note that this command might make sense to activate on both the server and the client as they have different perspectives You will have two log files though one on the server and on the ATE client LP Displays on the screen details about printing including processing of any EZSPL configuration file plus the printer init commands plus the actual communication or initialization operations with the printer itself Extremely useful for debugging printing problems SET TRACE LP ON then using PRINT to print a dummy file like ERSATZ INI SIGHUP UNIX only Log receipt of SIGHUP hangup and SIGTERM kill signals along with information indicating how the signal was responded to whether the program and ashell session were shut down etc We recommend you set this switch permanently in the miame ini file TRACE SIGHUP since they should be relatively rare and frequently either worth investigating directly or they provide an explanation for something else you are investigating SYSERR Display in a pop up window on screen details about all errors This is sometimes useful for see the system error details corresponding to a particular A Shell error but can also be annoying since it presents the appearance of a serious error having occurred sometimes in
50. cifying the F switch In addition any of the compiler line switches may be specified and these are passed on to the compilation phase The pre compiler was traditionally called PREBAS under AMOS As with the compiler itself A Shell contains two versions one for AlphaBASIC 1 3 OPRE and one for AlphaBASIC 1 4 PRE A DO file with the name PREBAS if desired may be set up to use the appropriate version As with include COPY will accept either AMOS format file specifications or host pathnames as arguments A Shell Command Reference page 75 PRINT PRINT spooler lt wildcard list gt switches The A Shell version of PRINT functions similarly to the AMOS version and supports the switches given in the table below As with the AMOS version you only need to include enough characters of the switch name to specify it uniquely Thus NOB is equivalent to NOBANNER etc Also the default for most switches may be set by a statement e g BANNER OFF in the INI for that printer If the spooler name is omitted the default as specified by the PRINTERS statement in the MIAME INI will be used It must match up with a spooler initialization file named TEMP lt spooler gt PQI or SYS lt spooler gt INI or ASHCFG lt spooler gt PQI which contains the configuration parameters for that logical printer Under A Shell Windows you can also use the special spooler name PROMPT which displays a typical Windows printer selection dialog
51. d Edit History commands In addition to the automatic edit history feature see UPDATE and AUTODELETE above there are also a couple of features which ease the maintenance of manual edit history notation One is based on XED and is invoked with _E Control Shift Underline followed by E while the other is based on d VUE and is invoked with SE Control S followed by E They both start by searching the file for the current edit number as defined by either a VEDIT statement or a PROGRAM XXXXX statement VEDIT is the symbol used by AMOS assembly language source files to define the edit number If you want to use it with other program types you will probably need to comment out the line to avoid compiler troubles Both commands search first for VEDIT then for PROGRAM If either is found with an acceptable syntax it reads the 3 digit edit number Then in the XED version it increments the number within the VEDIT or PROGRAM statement and uses it to construct a 2 line edit history entry which inserts at the line where the cursor was using the following format 124 October 02 1998 05 59 PM Edited by jack l The idea is that you will then add in your own information describing the purpose of the edit In the d VUE version the current edit number is not incremented and the only thing inserted into the file at the position of the cursor is the current edit number in notation This form is particularly useful for
52. d 924 of 29 March 2005 S Turns off the display of include file names This conflicts with the AlphaBASIC Plus compiler which uses S for SBR instead of XBR subroutine extensions Under A Shell subroutine name extensions are irrelevant since they are linked into the executable Note that since eliminating the include messages makes it difficult to determine which include file an error occurs in the error message format is modified by this switch to include the file name and line number V 1 Attempts to match new features and quirks of the AMOS version of COMPIL LIT 1 4 309 and higher released with AMOS 2 3A Unfortunately although this version of COMPIL shares the same major and minor version number 1 4 with preceding versions it introduces some new features and generates RUN modules with various differences causing them to be incompatible with earlier versions of RUN LIT This is true under both AMOS and A Shell The main reason for using this switch would be if you are using a source code feature that was not previously supported WARNING Even with the V 1 switch the A Shell compiler does not support all of the AlphaBASIC 1 4 changes and may not generate the same hash as the AMOS version Also note that X 1 and X 2 both implicitly give you V 1 features Features that are activated by V 1 include e LOOKUP returns 0 5 for a zero block file e READ ONLY option on OPEN statements e READ READ ONLY statement
53. d although it operates differently in each case the general idea is pretty much just like the AMOS equivalent SEND switches lt target name gt lt message gt The two optional switches are T and B which cause the message to appear on the top or bottom status line respectively of the target terminal rather than at the current cursor location This assumes that the target terminal supports status line operations otherwise the switch is ignored The lt target name gt may be either the job name or the login user name of the person you want to send a message to or ALL TODOS or TOUS for everyone You can use the SYSTAT command to help you determine which job and user names are available Under UNIX SEND is implemented via the operating system s signal delivery system If the target is running PolyShell then the message will appear in a pop up window Otherwise the message will simply appear at the current screen cursor location overwriting whatever was there previously Because of UNIX security rules it is impossible for one user to send signals to another unless the first user has superuser privileges or unless they are both sharing the same effective user ID Refer to the A Shell Setup Guide Installation for instructions on achieving this Under Windows SEND is implemented using the Inter Job Communication IJC system which was introduced in A Shell 4 6 Unless the T or B switch i
54. d file is not found the optional message following the which is mandatory is displayed and execution continues with the following line Otherwise the following line is skipped Typically this is used with GOTO to create a conditional branch as in the following LOOKUP 0 0 does not exist GOTO DONE EXIT might also be appropriate here VUE 0 DONE A Shell Command Reference page 111 Special Variables The DO file processor supports several special information variables or built in macros which take the form x or xx where x is alphabetic The supported variables are listed here those that are A Shell extensions are noted at the end of the list Original device e g DSKO P O Original ppn e g 7 6 TM Time of day in 24 hour HH MM format e g 13 27 STD TW Current day of week as a number 0 Mon 1 Tue NJ Current job name e g TSKAAA SNT SND NS Current OS e g AIX Ssv UX Current radix e g 8 or 16 LG Current language e g ENGLISH LY Yes character e g Y LN No character e g N NU Current login name e g root The following are supported only under A Shell HF Current host full path e g vm miame dsk0 001004 HD Current host disk e g dsk0 HP Current host ppn e g 001004 HM MIAME env var definition e g vm miame These special information variables a
55. e 105 CMDLIN This system variable is automatically set to contain the remainder of the command line used to start the current program For example if the program was started with RUN FALALA do re mi Then A CMDLIN would set A to DO RE MI always folded to upper case XCALL LSTLIN A on the other hand would return RUN FALALA do re mi the complete command line with no folding DIVIDE BY 0 This statement along with its converse determine how an attempt to divide by zero is handled from that point forward in the program In the default case NO DIVIDE BY 0 such an attempt causes an error 10 After DIVIDE BY 0 has been executed such an attempt will return a quotient of 0 PRAGMA NO LINE NUMBERS same as O ERROR IF NOT MAPPED same as M FORCE 24 BIT same as A FORCE_EXT ext force compiler output to use ext extension instead of RUN See A Shell Extensions below for additional PRAGMAs only supported by A Shell Hex Octal ASCII Values Hex octal and ASCII radix notation can be used to specify numeric literal values 1 e amp h100 hex 100 256 decimal amp 0100 octal 100 64 decimal A ascii A 65 decimal These can be used in expressions where you would otherwise be able to use numeric literal values This was added to A Shell in Build 923 of 15 March 2005 DEFINE DEFINE symbol value This statement defines the constant lt symbol gt
56. e ALLOCATE INDEXED supports the Device param PLUS Extensions The X 1 switch or equivalently COMPLP extends the compiler support to include certain statements which were originally implemented by BASIC Plus under AMOS these are listed below Refer to the AlphaBASIC PLUS User s Manual published by Alpha Microsystems for more details on these language features page 106 A Shell Command Reference Note that although A Shell supports these BASIC Plus language extensions in source code in no way does it support the RP compiled BASIC Plus file format Instead it compiles them as non standard extensions to the RUN format and any such RUN files will not be compatible with RUN LIT or RUNP LIT under AMOS Thus if you choose to use these language extensions and want to run them under both A Shell and AMOS you will have to recompile the source on both platforms Do While Until Loop EXIT For Next Loop IF ENDIF EDIT FILL pattern length ODTIM READ ONLY OPEN for APPEND Integer variable type AMOS GETKEY CMDLIN DIVIDE BY 0 PRAGMA LOOKUP fspec function ERRMSG x function STRIP var function or STRIP var INPUT RAW CHAIN prog arg1 arg2 ISAM INDEXED EXCLUSIVE ISAMP INDEXED EXCLUSIVE Hex Octal ASCII Values DEFINE A Shell Command Reference EXIT may be placed inside of a DO WHILE or FOR NEXT loop to cause an immediate exit of the loop IF lt condition gt T
57. e and size specifiers rather than being limited to F6 and string with size determined by STRSIZ e The element size is evaluated at runtime whereas with DIM it is evaluated at compile time e At allocates the memory needed out of the system memory pool rather then from the user partition Memory used by DIMX is automatically released when the program ends Warning DIMX creates a runtime token that will not be recognized by earlier version of the runtime system So if you compile a program using DIMX in 4 9 931 or higher and then run it under a previous version of A Shell you ll get an invalid syntax code basic error 34 when you hit the DIMX statement INPUT CSV INPUT CSV CH varl var2 varn Acts much like INPUT CH input from a file except that it expects CSV Comma Separated Values format Actually despite the name CSV files can use TAB delimiters as well as comma delimiters This is quite handy when inputting CSV files created from spreadsheet or other standard utility programs One other important difference between INPUT CSV CH and INPUT CH is that INPUT CSV CH operates on only one line of the file per call unlike INPUT CH which operates on a field by field basis without regard to the line terminators In other words if the input line contains more fields than there are variables in the INPUT CSV statement those extra fields are discarded Conversely if there are more variables in the INPUT CSV statement t
58. e that these two functions LCS KBDn and UCS KBDn are the only ones supported on the DO command line A Shell Command Reference page 115 Concatenate Parameters This capability was added to A Shell in build 910 of 3 January 2005 DO LIT 2 1 122 supports a mechanism for concatenating parameters on the command line before they are bound to the 0 thru 9 formal parameters The syntax consists of prepending to the start of a parameter that you want to combine with the prior parameter For example consider a generic DOTHIS DO file consisting of the following command HOST 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 If you executed it with DOTHIS play ina Stgada tdavida real loud The resulting host command would be play inagadadavida real loud Note that real and loud which started out in positions 4 and 5 got shifted by the concatenation down to 2 and 3 You can also use the operator in the middle of an argument to avoid the argument renumbering problem just described i e DOTHIS play ina gada t davida real loud In this case it is more clear that there are only 4 arguments 0 thru 3 being passed to DOTHIS This technique is mainly of interest in conjunction with KBDn variables and the UCS LCS functions where you may want to concatenate some folded keyboard input with a hardcode value and doing do directly would interfere with the interpretation of the KBDn and LCS UCS syntax For example En
59. e the session will start in display vs command since the interpretation of the commands would differ between the modes See the START command in the ini vue file for info on starting in a specified mode R Read only mode You might want to consider EZTYP as an alternative to this Trace steps involved in locating and processing the ini vue file Useful for debugging Start in 132 column wide mode Y Automatically answer affirmatively to the question about whether to create a non existent file The HELP command is fully implemented Use gt HELP VUE from A Shell VUE command mode to get on screen lists of commands available within A Shell VUE Other useful HELP files shipped with A Shell are INFLD e g gt HELP INFLD INMEMO TCRT and SPOOL And you may transfer any other HLP HLV files from AMOS to A Shell for the same purpose page 98 A Shell Command Reference INI VUE As with the AMOS version A Shell s VUE starts by searching for an INI VUE file The search path consists of the current PPN the p 0 directory and DSKO 7 0 If found the contents are processed in much the same way they would be if they were typed in VUE s command mode The set of possible commands is shown below Default values are shown first Most of the options work under A Shell as they do under AMOS with a few exceptions which are noted here Command Values AUTODELET OFF ON E CVTWARN DEFAULT ext1 ext2 ext3 up to 10
60. ec gt The DO command forces fspec to be treated as a DO file rather than a LIT or CMD file This is useful in situations where the fspec in question exists in CMD and or LIT variations as well as DO since otherwise the command search path would cause the CMD or LIT to be found first It is also needed to force a file with an extension other than DO to be interpreted as a DO file although it is not clear why you want to do that DO LIT is invoked automatically by the command line processor if it determines that the specified file is a DO file so it is not necessary to explicitly use DO except in the situations described above DO LIT is responsible for preprocessing the DO file to perform argument and macro substitutions MDO LIT is identical to DO LIT but is referenced internally under different circumstances Update Notes Version 2 1 117 Build 864 3 04 Feb 04 DO LIT and MDO LIT increase the maximum expanded do file from about 62K to about 122K This is about the maximum size for a 430K partition which is about the minimum partition needed for some other large LIT commands such as SUBMIT It will now complain explicitly if the partition size is not sufficient Update Notes Version 2 1 122 Build 910 0 7 03 Jan 05 When DO is used within a DO file to reference another DO file the command line may contain references variables input during execution of the current DO file K BDO thru KBD9 see KO K9 Commands upper and l
61. ectory entry not the actual data Because of this it will also not update the file modification DIR UDATE date although it will update the CDATE When the source and destination PPNs are the same MOVE is equivalent to RENAME The delete switch is needed to overwrite an existing output file The query switch causes MOVE to prompt for a confirmation before copying each of the input files lt out wildspec gt may be a single file or a wildcard specification lt in wildspec gt may be a single file a wildcard specification or a comma delimited list of file or wildcard specifications If you like this utility but do not want to worry about it not being available under Windows you have two choices besides not using it One would be to volunteer to modify MOVE LIT to work under Windows We would be happy to provide you the source code The other would be to create a MOVE DO for your Windows installations which performed COPY and then ERASE Since DO file argument parsing is somewhat less flexible than for LITs you would probably want to require that the equals sign be delimited by spaces on either side so as to make sure in the ERASE statement that you were only erasing the source arguments The example below illustrates one approach to this with appropriate syntax checking MOVE DO Windows approximation of MOVE LIT R IF S 0 Ww wee GOTO SYNTAX DIF IF bd lt gt wow GOTO SYNTAX ENDIF za COPY 0 1 2 3
62. ed over a WAN page 90 A Shell Command Reference Pause after each page of display Also see the notes on PAGE for another way to get the same effect Display Real jobs only Omits PolyShell control jobs from the display switch Re Display in wide mode Also totals several of the columns Similar to K but for zombies rather than phantoms Identical to Z except that it skips zombies that were launched via SUBMIT Such jobs predictably become zombies if the submitting job exits even though they may continue to function as intended Thus you may not necessarily want to kill them along with other zombies c Displays the controlling terminal s device identification rather than the user s name Under UNIX the user s name is set by the UNIX login whereas the device name is determined by the user s connection to the host Under Windows the user name and device name are the same except for a numeric suffix since both come from the NETBIOS machine name K Checks for and kills phantom jobs under UNIX These can occur when the underlying UNIX process is somehow destroyed such as by a kill KILL operation performed by a superuser without A Shell being able to trap and recognize it If such a process is found SY STAT will then remove it cleanly from the job table and output both an asterisk in column 7 of the display as well as a more descriptive message on the following line W Display in wide
63. ed with various situations such as job name program account etc One potential problem with printing excerpts from a file is that the file may have contained special printer control codes typically at the start of the file which are lost when only an excerpt of the file is printed There is no simple and universal solution to this problem and you will have to use a workaround approach appropriate to your situation For example once you realize that the file is 132 columns wide you can select a printer whose default configuration is set for 132 column printing Refer to the A Shell Setup Guide Printer ini files for information on how you can create a logical printer that automatically starts in a particular configuration If your application handles printer control codes via the PREFIX and SUFFIX options in the Printer INI rather than by embedding them in the file itself this problem will be minimized All you need is enough sense to select the appropriate printer to handle the excerpt If you are using a terminal emulator such as ZTERM which offers a choice of printer font sizes for local printing that may be another solution In that case make sure to add a Local printer option which uses the AUXLOC pseudo printer device which in turn will route the printout back to your terminal or emulator for local printing As of A Shell version 4 7 808 another possibility for dealing with the printing difficulty just described
64. em particularly on a large system Causes the console or tty name to be displayed for each job instead of the user name Sorts the entries by job name Sorts the entries by user name Sorts the entries by program name ASTAT was actually developed and then contributed to the A Shell community by Carl Staff of Diversified Data Systems Thanks Carl page 106 A Shell Command Reference ATECFG Windows only ATECFG is a wrapper for the Windows program ATECFG EXE which is installed along with A Shell Windows and which allows you to add or edit ATE configurations ATE A Shell Terminal Emulator is a facility that allows you to turn your A Shell Windows session into a client connected to another machine over serial or network telnet links This is a fairly bare bones terminal emulator not intended to compete with full blown standalone emulators such as ZTERM but which is nonetheless convenient and useful in many situations It is invoked via TELNET LIT In order to use TELNET to make a connection to another machine you must first define a configuration which is a collection of parameters describing the connection Such configurations are stored in the local Registry The parameters are reasonably self explanatory to anyone familiar with telnet and serial connections See the discussion on TELNET for more information about ATE ATECTL ATECTL switch ATECTL allows you to connect switch C disconnect
65. erparts do support these function Note that DO files do not have to take advantage of argument substitution thus making CMD files somewhat redundant In addition to the normal commands that make sense at the command prompt CMD and DO files also support some special commands and symbols which only make sense within CMD and DO files and which allow them to be somewhat more program like Consider the following sample DO file MAIN DO then see the following sections for more information Example MAIN DO SD 100 MENU defaults for 0 and 1 a trace echo commands LOG DSKO 150 0 R don t trace commands IF LOOKUP MENU DAT 1 lt Sorry no MENU DAT here gt GOTO DONE ENDIF RUN 1 DONE this is a label IF SNU lt gt admin force all users except admin HOST to exit A Shell ELSE H lt ow returning to cm prompt gt ENDIF A Shell Command Reference page 107 Arguments 0 through 9 The formal arguments 0 through 9 within the DO file are replaced by the first through tenth space delimited tokens on the command line that invokes the DO file with the first token being the one following the name of the DO file itself on the command line Thus if the command line was DO MAIN 22 GL then 0 will be replaced by 22 and 1 by GL This differs from DOS which uses 0 through 9 and UNIX which uses 0 through 9 both of which use the zero
66. es gt lt wildspec gt wildlist EL and EP launch the A Shell Editor from within A Shell EL the Lite version EP the Pro version When executed EL EP looks for the initialization file EDITOR INI in 7 0 if not found an option to build one will be offered Parameters compil switches should be space delimited and preceded by EDITOR INI a hyphen The default switches are defined in wildspec is a standard AMOS wildcard spec wildlist is an optional list of zero or more file ext specifications which may contain wildcards but no device or ppn Examples el x 2 m prog bas el bas el mysrc myfile bas b i map el cfg displays edits EDITOR INT el help displays help el launches Editor with no files Comments EL EP will look for additional options in EDITOR INI EDITOR INI p 0 IB EDITOR INI If the Save View State button was pressed before ending the previous session of the Editor then the current session will start with the files previously opened plus any files mentioned on the command line Note that EL LIT and EP LIT are copies of the same program at runtime the program looks at its own name to determine which version of the Editor to launch A Shell Command Reference page 105 ELSE IF lt expr gt lt statements to execute if true gt ELSE lt statements to execute if false gt ENDIF ELSE allows for the flow of control within a CMD or DO fi
67. even be turned on and off during a session When the connection is not available ATE will revert to using the keyboard channel for passing control A Shell Command Reference page 105 CHAT UNIX only CHAT allows two users to enter into a dialog in which they can type messages back and forth to each other this is similar to PTCHAT LIT under Poly TRACK While in the dialog their previous instance of A Shell is put into the background and automatically restored to the foreground when the dialog is over CHAT lt target name gt Target name may be either the job name or the login user name of the person you want to chat with You can use the SYSTAT command to help you determine this information The target user will then get a pop up message on his screen asking him if he wants to engage you in dialog If not or if he does not respond within 15 seconds the dialog does not take place While this is happening the originating user will have been returned to the dot prompt and can go on running another program If the target user does engage at that point a similar phenomenon will happen with the originating user A pop up dialog appears on the screen suspending the previous process Once the dialog begins it continues until either user exits by hitting the Escape key At that point the dialog is closed on both screens and both users go back to the process that was previously running Note that because of UNIX security rules it is impo
68. evices were often no more than 32 MB but in the Windows and UNIX world this is hardly a consideration When the specified file set already exists ISMUTL instead displays a menu of maintenance options LOAD load a file CHANGE change data device name ADD2ND add secondary key directory DELETE delete existing secondary key directory REBUILD rebuild primary amp secondary key indexes page 66 A Shell Command Reference DUMP dump ISAM file STAT display statistical information ADDIDX add index block DESCRP change key description EXIT exit to AMOS Again these options are designed to be CMD file compatible with the AMOS version so that any existing CMD files which execute ISMUTL commands will function the same way under A Shell ISAMPLUS under A Shell is implemented via a clone of the Informix C ISAM access method which has many advantages over a homegrown implementation but does suffer from a few small discrepancies with the AMOS implementation Some of these were mentioned above Another is that the data file extension is DAT rather than IDA as for AMOS This might create a conflict in programs that explicitly looked for that IDA file although the MAPIDA option in the miame ini file may handle most of those There is also a 1 block LCK file which is used for locking but which does not exist under AMOS Another difference is that the actual record size on disk will be one byte larger than
69. ext color n which is typically used for text both on buttons and in edit boxes and listboxes typically black Note that the n here is taken from the foreground palette unlike WINBCOLOR and SYSBCOLOR which both refer to color numbers from the background palette Along with SYSBCOLOR these can now be used via ATE on UNIX servers page 82 A Shell Command Reference Added in Build 904 13 October 2004 TSTATUS and BSTATUS may be set lt on off gt to control the presence of the top and bottom status bars Turning the status bars off makes for a somewhat cleaner display when doing screen captures for demo slide shows documentation etc TITLE definition string The SET TITLE command takes a string argument optionally preceded by TS and which may contain any literal text that you want to appear as the title If the TS prefix is specified the title will appear on the top status line otherwise it will appear on the window title bar providing you are running A Shell Windows or you are using ZTERM as your terminal emulator to connect to some flavor of A Shell UNIX The following special variables may appear anywhere in the title string Variable Displays NC Name of last executed command e g SET LOG or program ND Name of current logged in device e g DSKO SNJ NP Name of last program executed same as NC but excluding LITs PA Platform A Shell was compiled for e g Linux Windows 32
70. for ISAM 1 0 to be assumed New file type open specifiers ISAM INDEXED EXCLUSIVE and ISAMP INDEXED EXCLUSIVE can be use to avoid ambiguity and to allow both ISAM 1 0 and ISAMPLUS to coexist in the same program MX Acts like M except that it reports every line in which an unmapped variable appears even if that variable has already been reported Note that as with other errors typically only the first error on a line is reported Otherwise you might get dozens of errors on each line due to the cascading effect This switch was introduced in COMPIL LIT 1 0 114 A Shell build 902 of 27 September 2004 RC Enables the use of several compiler and source code enhancements without braking backwards Runtime Compatibility with AMOS To be effective you must use with COMPIL LIT OCMPIL LIT 1 0 117 not COMPLP and without any of the X switches The idea is to accommodate people who want to compile under A Shell and use as many A Shell features as possible but still retain the option of copying the RUN files to AMOS for execution there The features which RC adds to COMPIL or OCMPIL are e DEFINE A Shell Command Reference page 105 e Hex Octal ASCII Values e IF ENDIF e Do While Until Loop but not EXIT e Use of underline in identifiers e Max source line length of 3070 instead of 512 e PRAGMA all e Comment may follow an amp on a continuation line e INCLUDE nested 3 deep RC was added to A Shell in Buil
71. g from message is now indented to show the nesting When an ERSATZ specification is used with INCLUDE it becomes the default for any INCLUDEs nested below it So for example if the main program contains INCLUDE ASHINC ASHELL BSI and ASHELL BSI contains INCLUDE ASHELL DEF then the default location for ASHELL DEF will be in ASHINC If not found there or if the INCLUDE includes an explicit ersatz or dev p pn specification the normal rules apply This feature allows you to split an existing BSI into a BSI and a DEF without having to hardcode the location of the DEF file This was added to A Shell in Build 923 of 15 March 2005 A Shell Command Reference page 105 d BASIC Extensions The D switch extends the compiler support to include certain statements which are otherwise only available under the d BASIC compiler offered by d Soft Note that these comprise only a subset of the language extensions that d BASIC supports They were chosen for inclusion within A Shell purely on the basis of user demand Language Element Notes i O RTRIM var Strips the trailing blanks from the specified string variable AUTOCAP var Intelligently capitalizes the specified string Note that the A Shell implementation of this is rather minimal users in need of more intelligent capitalization should refer to XFOLD SBR in the A Shell XCALL Reference ACCOUNT This dot variable evaluates to the user s current ppn e g 10
72. han there are fields in the input line then the extra variables are set to null This greatly simplifies importing data from disparate sources PAD PAD var size or PADS var size Returns a string equal to the input string var which must be string format padded with trailing spaces out to the length specified by size In other words this is the opposite of STRIP var If size is less than the current length of var then it functions just like the LEFT var size function RETURN lt expression gt This form of the RETURN statement must be used within an SBX routine to return to the calling program with the specified expression as the value of the function called by XFUNC If the SBX was called via XCALL rather than XFUNC then this statement will be treated as equivalent to an END i e end the subroutine and return to the caller See XFUNC in the A Shell Developer Guide for more information on implementing external functions XGETARG XGETARGS XPUTARG These statements may be used in place of the MIAMEX MX_XCBDATA calls to retrieve and return values within an SBX routine page 106 A Shell Command Reference XGETARGS ARG1 ARG2 ARGN XGETARG ARGNO ARG XPUTARG ARGNO ARG XGETARGS retrieves the XCALL arguments into the corresponding variables The first argument is returned in ARGI the second in ARG2 etc If more arguments were passed than you specify variables for the extra arguments are ignored Conversely
73. he filespec is case sensitive For example the following are equivalent DSKO COPY LIT 1 4 dskO copy lit 1 4 Dsk0 Copy Lit 1 4 In these examples the physical device is DSK the logical unit is 0 and the PPN is 1 4 The file name is COPY and the extension is LIT Under AMOS a logical unit was essentially a partition within a physical disk device more or less equivalent to a drive letter under Windows Within each logical unit there were individual directories identified by a pair of octal numbers each ranging from 0 377 referred to as a PPN Project Program Number Individual directories i e a PPN within a logical unit within a physical unit could also be assigned aliases called ERSATZ devices which have the syntax of device names This is similar to the situation under Windows where a drive letter can be mapped to another directory These ERSATZ devices are defined in a text file DSK0 ERSATZ INI 1 4 You can add your own each one consisting of up to 6 RAD50 characters starting with an alphabetic character In addition the standard ERSATZ INI defines ERSATZ device names for a collection of PPNs on DSKO which are considered the system accounts and which are listed in the following table Device P PN ERSATZ System Account Purpose DSKO 1 2 System operator account This account has special privileges and is usually password protected Logging into this account might be considered analogous to logging
74. he most common position is at the end The lt outfile gt syntax element in the second example above indicates that the output of the command will be sent to that file rather than to the screen This is roughly the AMOS equivalent of the UNIX technique of redirecting stdout to a file For some commands like COPY and APPEND lt outfile gt is mandatory Also note that unlike DOS and UNIX output file arguments precede the input file arguments i e they are reversed and are separated by the equal sign Command lines are tokenized using both spaces and commas plus other punctuation characters For example the command name itself may be terminated by a space slash equal sign or new line Arguments for LIT commands are typically separated by commas while arguments for DO commands must be separated by spaces The semicolon marks the beginning of a comment as in this example DIR V MYAPP LST A RUN B RUN C RUN this is a comment This would create the file MYAPP LST containing the directory information including version V of the three specified files page 12 A Shell Command Reference Command Search Path When only the command name i e no device PPN or extension is specified the search path for the command is given in the table below Fiespec searched or woes If the command extension is included with the command name then the search path is modified from the above to first look for the co
75. hell Setup Guide Installation for further details on dealing with the UNIX privilege issues In the Windows environment FORCE uses the IJC Inter Job Communication system which has no privilege issues but is subject to being turned off by the IJCFREQ command in the MIAME INI Update Notes Version 2 0A 105 Build 864 4 05 Feb 04 FORCE LIT supports the AMOS style multi line syntax i e FORCE TSKAAB LOG BAS RUN MYPROG 15 TIME The above would force TSKAAB to execute LOG BAS then RUN MYPROG then 15 and finally a blank line Tilde by itself is treated as a blank line The blank line terminates the force operation The TIME command would then be executed back in the current job Note that under A Shell Windows the response time for receiving forced commands may be several seconds To avoid overrunning the target job the sender will be forced to wait for each command to be acknowledged by the receiver It also supports forcing commands to yourself This is useful for forcing input to a program that does not normally accept input from a command file It is usually used with the NJ system variable in DO files to specify the current jobname e g MYPROG DO R LOG BAS FORCE NJ RUN MYPROG 15 TIME Note that the TIME command here will execute before the forced commands since CMD and DO input is processed first then typeahead Also note that there isn t much point in this exerc
76. her now or at a specified later time which executes commands specified in the control file Under AMOS this is managed by a background job called the Task Manager Under A Shell there are actually three different possibilities depending on the operating system and whether the after and next switches are used e Windows e UNIX without switches e UNIX with switches In all cases like its AMOS counterpart SUBMIT requires a control file typically with a CTL extension which functions more or less just like a command or DO file i e containing the commands necessary to run the job along with any keyboard inputs Programs running under the control of SUBMIT will automatically take their input from the control file even if they wouldn t normally accept input from a command file When the control file runs out of input the process terminates The preferred way to terminate the process is for the program to cleanly exit back to the control file and for the control file to end optionally with a LOGOFF command Do file Unlike the AMOS implementation the A Shell version of SUBMIT allows DO parameter file parameters to be passed to the control file which can use the 0 9 syntax just like normal DO files to represent the formal parameters Any space delimited tokens following the control file name and preceding the first switch marked by a slash will be passed to the control file as DO parameters inifile Forces the child process
77. ignal SIGTERM to abort the underlying UNIX process causing a BASIC error 251 in the aborted program Once this is complete it checks to see if the job left any resources locked in the qflock sys or jobtbl sys files If so it prompts you to confirm whether you want them cleaned up The Y switch will assume that the answer to this question is Y allowing it to be used in unattended processes An example of where you might want to use this is in a nightly processing routine that requires all users to be either logged out or at least at a known menu This could be accomplished under UNIX by executing SYSTAT LIT L and then reading the resulting SYSTAT LST file and checking to see which jobs are not in the proper state Then a command file using KILL lt job gt for each such job can be generated and executed Without the K Y arguments to KILL it would only have the effect of forcing a Control C to these jobs Since this might not be sufficient to force the wayward jobs out of their programs you could use KILL lt job gt K Y Or if you want to really be fancy you could try it first without the K Y then run another SYSTAT to see if it succeeded and only then use KILL K Y on the stragglers Because of UNIX security rules it is impossible for one user to send signals to another unless the first user has superuser privileges or unless they are both sharing the same effective user ID Refer to the A Shell Setup Guide Installation for
78. in as Administrator under Windows or as the superuser under UNIX Certain commands for example will only run or have greater powers when executed from this account DSKO 1 4 SYS The system account This is the default location for all of the system commands those with LIT extensions plus certain configuration files such as the language files and ERSATZ INI DSKO 1 6 DVR Terminal driver and language definition file account Under A Shell terminal drivers are embedded in the executable so the only files you will normally have in this account of the language definition files e g ENGLSH LDF DSKO 1 7 ASHCFG A Shell configuration files in particular printer init PQI files DSKO 2 2 CMD Command files i e those with CMD or DO extensions These are the AMOS and A Shell equivalents of BAT files under DOS or shell scripts under UNIX DSKO 7 0 LIB Library files Function key translation tables color configuration files INI VUE VUE initialization file page 10 A Shell Command Reference Device P PN ERSATZ System Account Purpose DSKO 7 1 HLP Help files A Shell tends to embed help which is associated with system commands in the commands themselves or use external PDF Acrobat or CHM Windows Compiled Help files leaving this directory only for the help files that are displayed from within the VUE command mode with the HELP command DSKO 7 6 RUN files placed in this directory can be run fr
79. ined 8 SYSACT 16 SYSERR TRACE option 77 SYSTAT command 83 System memory 52 System status 83 T TAB VUE command 92 Tab delimited output 32 TAIL command 85 TALL VUE command 92 Target job 61 Target name 21 Task manager 80 82 TELNET command 85 TELNET configuration 20 Telnet server 86 TELSER command 86 Terminal device i d 84 drivers 95 emulator 20 handling 57 width and height 75 TERMINAL SET options 73 Terminate ATE session 85 Termination in CMD DO files 48 Termination job 61 TIMEcommand 39 TITLE 76 TITLE SET option 73 Token delimiter 101 TPRINT 32 TRACE SET option 73 Trace VUE command 102 TRACE options 77 Tracker 57 98 tty name 19 TYPE command 87 A Shell Command Reference U U command 87 UFD 45 UPDATE VUE command 93 User ID 21 61 72 memory 52 63 65 71 name 19 21 USRMEM TRACE option 77 V Variable rows 51 Variables in CMD DO files 105 VER 16 VERIFY command 88 Version info 90 VERSYS command 90 VUE command 91 VUX files 52 95 Ww WAV file 41 WHILE Loop 27 WIDE VUE command 92 Wide reports 51 Width terminal 75 Wildcards 12 WRAP VUE command 92 WRITECD TD 35 WSET command 98 X XCALL TRACE option 77 XED 91 XFUNC 36 XGETARG 33 XPUTARG 33 XY 16 Z Zap a user 70 Zero parameter 101 Zombies 81 84 ZTERM 20 98 ZXPWIN command 98 page 121
80. is to use the SBR EZPRTX parameter in the miame ini In this case whenever you print from within EZVUE it will call the subroutine EZPRTX SBX passing it the desired page range parameters and let it handle the print operation The source to a generic EZPRTX SBX lt is included in the release in DSKO 7 376 with the idea that application developers can customize it to provide more sophisticated handling of partial file print requests For example you can add code to deal with the printer feature codes printer selection etc page 106 A Shell Command Reference Wide reports EZVUE will automatically switch into 132 column mode if a cursory examination of the first several lines of the file indicates the presence of lines longer than 80 columns unless AUTOWIDTH OFF in the EZ SPOOL configuration file You can also switch between 80 132 columns with the left and right arrow keys But if 132 columns is not enough you can continue to hit the right arrow key to shift the entire display window over several columns at a time Hitting the left arrow will reverse this process finally returning you to 80 column mode when you hit the left margin Variable rows If your terminal supports this capability Shift Up Arrow and Shift Down Arrow or just T for Tall Toggle will toggle you between the normal 24 row display and a 42 row display On a modern high resolution display viewing a large file at 42 x 132 is quite reasonable and much more efficient tha
81. ise unless MYPROG in this page 106 A Shell Command Reference case doesn t accept command file input Otherwise we could just omit the FORCE command and MYPROG would run the same from the DO file as it would with the forced input A Shell still supports the non AMOS standard single line FORCE in which the command is passed on the command line e g FORCE TSKAAB LOG SYS M Note that in this mode you have to explicitly add a M to the end of the line to force a carriage return Finally note that the LITMSG xxx message files have been updated for some new messages in FORCE A Shell Command Reference page 105 HEAD HEAD outfile lt wildspec gt switches The HEAD command is similar to the eponymous UNIX command and is used to display or copy to another file the first N lines of a specified file or wildcard list of files The supported switches are Switches delete Required when an output file is specified that already exists lines Specify the number of lines to copy or display Default is 20 query Prompt for confirmation on each file As with virtually all other A Shell and AMOS LIT commands the switches can be abbreviated to the minimum number of unique letters L D and Q in the cases above Also note that virtually all commands which support wildcards support the Q switch Examples This example displays the first 20 lines of the specified file more or less equivalent to using PAGE TYPE
82. l A Shell Command Reference page 71 MAP MAP f ull MAP displays the contents of user memory like its AMOS counterpart If the F or FULL switch is specified it displays the module flag codes associated with each module from the table below and also the module version Beginning with version 2 2 106 MAP displays the version number of program modules if the F ULL switch specified This is particularly helpful when trying to figure out if you ve got the proper version of an auto loaded SBX or RUN file in memory Module is cached in memory and will be deleted automatically as needed L Module is locked see LOAD LOCK and cannot be deleted except by DEL UNLOCK Module is permanent AMOS terminology indicating that it was manually loaded and thus will not be automatically deleted Use DEL to delete Module is running and cannot be deleted under any circumstances Module is temporary will be overwritten by next module loaded MEMORY MEMORY lt size gt k m MEMORY is similar to its AMOS counterpart except that it can be used at any time to change the user s memory partition size Under AMOS you can only reduce your partition size after the system is booted The initial memory size is set by the MEMORY statement in the MIAME INI file Note that although A Shell s user memory implementation has some similarities to the AMOS equivalent there are also several differences For one when you
83. l switches Switches lock switch locks the module in memory so that it cannot be deleted except by specifying the unlock switch on the DEL command unlock is needed in order to reload update in memory a module that was previously locked with the lock switch c switch indicates that the specified module name is not a disk file to be loaded into user memory but the name of a COMMON module which is to be initialized This distinction is necessary since COMMON modules continue to be implemented via internal memory buffers within A Shell rather than via user memory Update Notes Build 854 21 Nov 03 The maximum number of modules which can be loaded into user memory per job has been increased from 32 to 96 page 70 A Shell Command Reference LOG LOG n lt destination gt A Shell maps AMOS format file specifications onto host pathnames using the definitions given with the MIAME DEVICE commands in the environment configuration file On entering A Shell your current working directory is translated into your current AMOS login account If there is no mapping defined then you enter A Shell in a logged off state You may use the LOG command to log in and subsequently change your login account to one with a valid mapping to an existing host machine directory The implementation of LOG will check for the validity of the PPN execute any START CMD command file unless N specified and accept and display ERSATZ names It doe
84. le based on various conditions that can be tested It takes no arguments and its usage should be clear from the example above See page 106 A Shell Command Reference CMD and DO Files for more information ENDIF ENDIF is needed to terminate a conditional group of a CMD DO statements which was started with an IF or See the description on ELSE for an example and refer to the notes on ELSE statement A Shell Command Reference page 105 CMD and DO Files for more information Also see the discussion of MOVE for an example of ENDIF usage A Shell Command Reference page 105 ERASE ERASE lt wildspecl gt query ERASE not surprisingly erases files The query switch causes ERASE to prompt for a confirmation before erasing each file matching the wildcard specification ERSATZ ERSATZ displays the list of current ersatz device definitions These definitions are maintained within one or more text files each of which is referenced via an ERSATZ statement in the miame ini file The ersatz devices may be used syntactically just like real device names Additions to the LAST specified ersatz definition file i e the last ERSATZ statement in the miame in1 will be recognized within several seconds Additions to any other ersatz definition file will not be recognized until you re launch your A Shell session EXIT EXIT terminates a CMD or DO file and is only needed when you would like to terminate it somewhere other than the
85. lent e g ISMDMP ISMUTL SUBMIT SYSTAT etc Even for the first category the many differences between AMOS and Windows or UNIX syntax make the A Shell emulations of the AMOS LIT commands worthwhile For example what would be the Windows UNIX equivalent of the command Although LIT commands are useful in themselves and often typed directly by users at the dot prompt they are more commonly grouped together in CMD or DO files which are conceptually equivalent to BAT or script files under Windows or shell scripts under UNIX Due to the obvious utility of being able to create a complex series of command operations that can be invoked via a single command line they are extensively used in most existing applications This perhaps more than any other reason is the justification for implementing so many of the AMOS LIT commands in A Shell i e so that existing CMD and DO files would not have to be rewritten when porting applications from AMOS A section on the details of writing CMD and DO Files is included at the end of this document A Shell Command Reference page 9 Filespecs and Directories AMOS organizes disk space into physical devices logical units and a pair of octal numbers referred to as the PPN Within this structure are the files which consist of a one to six character name and a one to three character extension The characters used in filenames are from the RAD50 set which consists of 0 9 A Z and No part of t
86. ll Windows allows you to set the terminal height to any value from to 50 rows and the width to any value from 1 to 160 columns This can also be done via the TAB 5 rows and TAB 6 cols commands Under UNIX the ability to do this is limited by your terminal emulator In most cases you are limited to 24 rows and either 80 or 132 columns The notable exception is ZTERM which in the most recent updates supports variable rows up to 50 Typing SET TERM by itself will display the ZTERM version if applicable in addition to the current width height foreground and background colors and terminal driver BEVEL off auto Set beveling option to off auto or program program SYSBCOLOR n Link background color n to Windows dialog button color n gray WINBCOLOR Link background color n to Windows edit box color white n WINTXTCLR Link foreground color n to Windows text color black n TSTATUS Turn top status line on off BSTATUS Turn bottom status line on off Comments As of Build 897 10 August 2004 SET LIT supports two new commands to link A Shell color palette numbers to Windows desktop colors to go along with the existing SET TERM SET TERM WINBCOLOR n SET TERM WINTXTCLR n The first WINBCOLOR sets the Window Background color n which is typically used for the background of small windows such as edit boxes checkboxes and listboxes typically white The second WINTXTCLR sets the Window T
87. lus compiler extensions OPEN for APPEND When compiled in BASIC Plus mode an attempt to open a sequential file for APPEND mode will automatically create the file if it does not already exist Causes a file not found error under previous versions of BASIC I Integer variable type An integer variable type is supported under BASIC Plus This format is similar to B binary variables except for the following e I variables come in only 1 2 and 4 bytes e I variables may hold negative values e I variables use Alpha s 68K byte order high word low word low byte high byte instead of the strict low byte to high byte format used by B variables As far as A Shell is concerned there is no advantage to this variable type other than compatibility with programs already using it except in cases where you need to support negative integers AMOS AMOS switch lt command gt Invokes an AMOS command from within BASIC Similar to XCALL AMOS The optional switch may be T or S to either force tracing or silencing of all output same idea as T and S in CMD DO files If omitted the default is to display the output of commands but not the commands themselves like R GETKEY GETKEY X xltname This function inputs and returns a single character The optional xltname argument may be used to specify a function key translation table to process the character through if it is a function key A Shell Command Reference pag
88. mally only have LF line terminators whereas AMOS Windows and DOS use CRLF page 80 A Shell Command Reference CMDINP This turns on and off command file input within XCALL INPUT or XCALL INFLD The default is off in which case these input routines do not accept input from a command file INFLD supports a TYPE code p which turns on command file input and you can force this on by adding SBR INFDEF p to your miame ini file But these methods either require a change to your program or that you exit from A Shell and modify the miame ini file The SET NO CMDINP command on the other hand can be used within A Shell or even within a command file For example you might have a command file which contains R SET CMDINP RUN MENU 15 lt program inputs gt S R ET NOCMDINP UN MENU HOST The above command file starts by setting command input on and then runs a menu program and forces it to select option 15 It then continues to include the necessary prompts for the program corresponding to menu option 15 after which that program finishes and returns to the command file Then it turns command file input back off again and starts up the main menu which now waits for real keyboard input Finally when the user exits out of that menu the command file picks up and forces A Shell to exit INFDEF This was added to SET LIT in version 1 0 142 of 6 January 2005 SET LIT now supports an INFDEF option to display or change the
89. mmand 92 CHAT command 21 CLS 14 CMD account defined 8 CMD files 100 CMDINP SET option 73 Colon commands 102 Color 75 COLUMN VUE command 92 Columns 51 75 Comma delimited files 35 Command file input 74 Command files 100 Command syntax 10 Compare files 79 88 Compatibility 11 COMPIL command 22 COMPIL switches 23 COMPLP 14 Concatenate file 18 Concatenate parameters 109 Conditionals in CMD DO files 47 58 Console name 19 Constants 29 Contiguous files 39 page 117 Control characters displaying 87 Control files 80 Control keys for editing 13 Control C 61 COPY command 38 CREATE command 39 CR LF character pair 95 cron 82 CSV files 33 CTRLC SET option 73 Cursor control 13 D d VUE 93 96 DATE command 39 DEBUG 32 DEBUG SET option 73 DEBUG TRACE option 77 DEFINE 29 DEL command 40 Device mapping 9 Device name terminal 84 Devices 8 40 Devices listing 83 DEVTBL command 40 DIFF command 41 Difference in files 79 DING command 41 DIR command 42 DIR V 90 DIRECT LST 38 Directory listing 88 Disk block dump 45 Display file 87 Display height 51 Divide by zero 29 DO command 44 DO file parameters 106 DO files 100 DO loop 27 Dot variable 37 DPRINT 32 DRAW VUE parameter 94 DUMP command 45 Dump ISAM file 60 Dump to screen 68 DVR account defined 8 Dynamic array allocation 32 page 118 E ECHO SET
90. mmand in the current PPN rather than in the system or CMD file directory Binary Compatibility While A Shell s LIT commands are binary compatible across A Shell platforms they are not binary compatible with the AMOS LIT commands In fact as previously mentioned A Shell s LIT commands are simply BASIC programs that have been renamed from RUN to LIT and which have appropriate startup logic to process command line arguments You can create your own LIT commands by doing the same thing A Shell Command Reference page 13 Wildcard Commands Many of the A Shell LIT commands support wildcard arguments Those that do are marked with an asterisk in the Class column of the alphabetical listing of LIT commands below Commands which support wildcards will also accept a comma delimited list of filespecs each of which may contain wildcards Supported wildcards are Matches any full or partial token in the specified position For example RUN matches any filename with a RUN extension Or AB DAT 1 would match any filename beginning with AB that has a DAT extension and is in the Project 1 When a portion of a filespec is omitted it may act like the wildcard For example DIR ABC is equivalent to DIR ABC rather than DIR ABC Matches one character If multiple are used together then the combination will match between 1 and the specified number of question mark characters For example A BC Would match any file any file s
91. must be quoted as in the example above However when using it as a DO file command argument it should not be quoted In the example above the DO file DOLOG DO will see the KBDO on its command line and convert it to whatever had been entered to the Enter desired ppn prompt KBDn variables cannot be used in any other context even within a CMD DO file Unlike other special xx variables which can appear in DO files which are expanded by DO LIT when it loads the DO file the BD variables cannot be expanded until after the input operation takes place and thus it is left to individual commands currently just IF and DO to interpret them This feature requires LIT files of at least the versions shown below IF LIT 1 0 106 DO LIT 2 1 121 MDO LIT 2 1 121 page 114 A Shell Command Reference Input Case This capability was added to A Shell in build 909 7 of 19 December 2004 DO LIT 2 1 121 supports the ability to specify the upper or lower case version of a KBDn variable on the command line which can be handy when building case sensitive UNIX commands from input strings The following example makes this clear TEST CMD lt Input something gt SKI DOTEST SKBD1 LCS KBD1 UCS KBD1 DOTEST DO lt Command line 0 1 2 gt Assuming that the user had input SiLly in response to the prompt in TEST CMD the output of the DOTEST command would be Command line SiLly silly SILLY Not
92. n for more information on the privilege issue A Shell Command Reference page 67 KILL KILL lt jobname gt k y KILL is similar to but more complex than itt AMOS counterpart and works differently depending on whether you are running under Windows or UNIX The additional complexity arises from the dual nature of jobs running under A Shell Such jobs have both an A Shell AMOS nature and an underlying Windows or UNIX process nature It also arises from the fact that unlike the AMOS counterpart this version of KILL actually tries to clean up resources left in limbo by the target process For UNIX KILL starts by checking if the underlying UNIX process still exists Under extreme circumstances it may be possible to abort a UNIX process without A Shell realizing it thus leaving a phantom job in the A Shell job table If the UNIX process no longer exists it offers to clean up the resources file locks and other queue blocks still associated with the job Otherwise it sends a trappable kill signal SIGINT same as Control C sends to the target process and waits a few seconds to see if the job goes away If so then we are done If the process does not go away possibly because the of insufficient privileges then this fact is reported and nothing further can be done unless the K switch was specified With K and provided that the user is logged into the OPR account it will then proceed to use a stronger but still trappable kill s
93. n at 24 x 80 A Shell Command Reference page 105 FIXTRN Documentation update July 2004 see Update Notes below FIXTRN ifx vux lt name pfk gt The FIXTRN command performs the functions of the AMOS FIXTRN and SET PFK commands allowing you to create and edit both types of function key translation tables The traditional types of function key translation table such as those used by VUE and INFLD have names that match the terminal driver with the extension indicating the application Thus AM62A IJFX would by the translation table for AM62A drivers when running INFLD PCTDV VUX would be for PCTDV terminal drivers when running VUE These files are compatible between AMOS and A Shell The main difference is that under A Shell they are always loaded automatically from the LIB account on disk whereas under AMOS you may need to load them explicitly into system or user memory To create or edit a function key translation table for WUE or INFLD use FIXTRN followed by IFX for the INFLD translation table or VUX for the VUE translation table e g FIXTRN IFX Editing function key translation file LIB PCTDV IFX It will automatically invoke the file for the current terminal driver PCTDV in the example above and automatically reference the LIB directory To create or edit a PFK style function key table one that can be used in any application and which can be manually loaded and deleted from user memory to
94. n editor obviously has to know exactly where you are in the file or you would not be able to edit it with the desired results The problem as mentioned above is that since EZVUE was designed to view large report files with the maximum performance and minimum memory overhead rather than be an editor it does not load the file into memory Instead it uses the operating system s seek facility which is byte oriented rather than page or line oriented A Shell Command Reference page 105 to move about the file For this reason it is not able at least initially to report the exact number of lines and pages in the file Instead it makes an estimate using the average line size for the part of the file that it has had to scan in order to display it To avoid giving a false impression of precision it displays a question mark next to those line and page numbers which are only estimates Any example may make this clear At the start it only reads enough lines to display one screen full At that point it knows exactly which line it is on but it can only estimate the number of lines and pages in the file so those figures will have question marks next to them If you then use the E command to go directly to the end of the file it does a direct seek to the end of the file then backtracks just enough so that it can display the last lines of the file At that point it does not even know which line number or page number it is currently on since it got t
95. nate this possibility compile your programs with M e If you attempt to DEFINE a symbol that has already been MAPPED you will get a duplicate label error So it doesn t really matter whether you DEFINE all your symbols first or do all your MAPs first or mix them together any conflict between the two will generate a compilation error A Shell Extensions The X 2 switch extends the compiler support to include certain statements which are only available under A Shell i e are not part of any known compatibility standard these statements are listed below The X 3 switch added in COMPIL LIT 1 0 115 plus the OCMPIL and COMPLP variants in A Shell Build 907 of 8 November 2004 is the same as X 2 but creates a SBX file instead of RUN Note that X 3 does not disturb an existing RUN so it is now possible to compile the same source both into a RUN and a SBX as follows COMPIL MYPROG X 2 create MYPROG RUN COMPIL MYPROG X 3 create MYPROG SBX However in order to make this workable you ll need to modify the XCALL BSI file to merely set a flag indicating if it is running in SBX mode or not instead of aborting with an error message if run directly using RUN MYPROG You would then test that flag to decide whether to pick up and return parameters page 106 A Shell Command Reference Control variable If DEBUG compile switch specified acts as if it equals 1 otherwise 0 If DEBUG switch not specified then it may still
96. nctions which are useful when more than one variable is being output on a line 1 It automatically inserts a comma between each variable being output 2 it automatically quotes any string variable which itself contains a comma and 3 it strips leading and trailing blanks from any string variable unless accompanied by a formatting mask Example WRITECD 1 5 2 Nov 1 1998 abc Outputs 5 2 Nov 1 1998 abc The maximum size of an individual field needing to be enclosed in quotes is 1021 bytes 906 2 04 Nov 2004 Update WRITECD WRITETD will convert any embedded quotes within a field into apostrophes to try to be more compatible with other CSV readers It will also now put double quotes around any field containing quotes or apostrophes in addition to commas and tabs as before Also note although this is not a change the procedure for breaking up a single line of CSV output into multiple WRITECD statements WRITECD CH A B C WRITECD CH D E F This will output the 6 variables on one line Note that that the comma after the C and before the semicolon is required If you omit it the D output will immediately follow C with no delimiter If you omit the semicolon from the first line then you ll get two lines of output XFUNC XFUNC Sbxname argl argn page 106 A Shell Command Reference XFUNCS Sbxname argl argn XFUNC executes an external function returning a value It is simila
97. nd and loudness or lack thereof page 106 A Shell Command Reference DI Documentation update October 2004 see LONG switch below DIR listspec fspecl fspecN switches The DIR command implements most of the switches available under AMOS although there are several differences that should be noted e First keep in mind that files will only be listed if you have file read permission for them In the case of UNIX it is also required that that the directory and all directories above it have the execute bit set The execute privilege on a directory controls whether the directory can be traversed This applies equally to all wildcard commands such as COPY and ERASE which will effectively not see files for which you have no read permission e Second unlike under AMOS where you could use DIRSEQ to sort the files in a directory it is rather non standard to sort an actual directory under Windows and UNIX Instead the DIR program itself is usually relied on to sort the display rather than sorting the directory itself Consequently a set of sorting options has been added to the A Shell version of DIR see switches beginning with S in the table below e Third MIN and MAX options have been added for no particular reason other than that somebody requested it ATIME and ADATE to display last access time and date were added just because that information is available under UNIX and Windows e Fourth since DIR wo
98. ndows only Logs information about processing of GDI printing directives GUI Windows only Logs information about TAB 10 x commands and operations on GUI objects ISAM Logs all ISAM statements LOCKS Logs details of locking operations and in some cases displays on the status line when the program is waiting on a lock Displays details about printing MALLOC Log details of all memory allocations R Log all random isam file reads and writes SIGHUP Log receipt of SIGHUP hangup and SIGTERM kill SIGNAL UNIX only Display received signals on screen e g SIGINT SIGALRM etc SOCKS Log details of socket operations TCPX SBR or ATE control socket SYSERR Display details about all errors USRMEM Log details about user memory operations i e loading of programs subroutines function key translation files etc LP W XCALL Log all XCALLs showing subroutine name and parameter list Often useful as a way of tracing what a program is doing or where it was when an unexplained error occurred page 84 A Shell Command Reference AMSORT Displays information in a pop up window during sorting operations showing the type of sort current phase memory usage etc If sorts are talking a long time this can be very useful for determining what is happening and how much memory you might need to improve the performance For very large sorts we also offer an add on world class sort module that is mu
99. nds of havoc in programs not prepared Z Strip EOF Z characters from the source files DOS files or files transferred to DOS Windows with some file transfer software sometimes end with a Z used as to filter these out If the outfile already exists it will be overwritten You may specify the same file as both the outfile and one of the infiles Update Notes Version 2 1 113 Build 897 10 Aug 04 APPEND LIT now handles long native filenames containing spaces For example the following is now legal APPEND TEST LST TEST LST STEMP THIS IS A LONG FILE LST A Shell Command Reference page 105 ASTAT ASTAT switches ASTAT displays a dynamically updated list of jobs currently running along with the current program name The list is formatted into two columns to fit more jobs on the screen making it useful on large systems You may condense the list further by putting the names of programs that are not of interest in the file BAS IGNORE PRG one per line Thus if you want to quickly size up if it is safe to do a shutdown or backup you may want to list those programs that are safe to interrupt such as the main menu application logon etc so that only the jobs which are doing something worthy of attention will be shown 1 9 Sets the sleep interval time between screen updates in seconds The default is 1 second Note that the shorter the interval the more load this program will place on the syst
100. o the end of the file without reading it sequentially from the beginning However if you request to seek directly to page 50 then it will be forced to scan from the beginning of the file line by line until it gets to page 50 At that point it still does not know the total number of lines or pages but it does know the current line number and page number and more importantly it now knows the position of all of the pages 1 50 Thus if you then ask to go backward 4 pages it can go more or less directly to that position without having to start over again from the beginning If you want to compute the precise number of lines and pages in the file you can do this by requesting to go directly to a page number which is greater than the number of pages in the file e g 9999 After executing that command it will have been forced to scan the entire file so from that point forward it will be able to report the precise number of lines and pages in the file and be able to go more or less directly to any position Printing The print command P allows you to print an excerpt from to page of the file This much is obvious What may not be obvious is where it gets the list of printers that you are allowed to select from Since this was originally developed as part of EZ SPOOL it uses the EZ SPOOL configuration file system for determining the names of the available printers This system allows different sets of printers and other options to be associat
101. om any other location DSKO 7 376 P A Shell sample program directory Mapping Filespecs Because the non AMOS operating systems where A Shell typically runs all use a multi level hierarchical directory system we map the AMOS style devices and PPNs to hierarchical directories using DEVICE statements in the MIAME INI file see the A Shell Setup Guide for detailed information about MIAME INI But a couple of simple examples should make the concept relatively clear DEVICE DSKO C VM MIAME DSKO Windows DEVICE DSKO myapp dsk0 UNIX The above definitions equate the A Shell device named DSKO with the directory C VM MIAME DSK0 Windows and with myapp dsk0 UNIX To these base directories we would convert the PPN into a six digit number using three digits for the Project number and three digits for the Programmer number Thus DSKO 1 4 would get mapped to C VM MIAME DSKO0 001004 in the first case and myapp dsk0 001004 in the second Finally the filename is appended to the end So DSKO COPY LIT 1 4 would be mapped to C VM MIAME DSK0 001004 COPY LIT in the first case Windows and to myapp dsk0 001004 copy lit in the second Under UNIX we fold the filespec to lower case to be consistent with typical UNIX conventions Each AMOS or A Shell device must be mapped to a native path as in the examples above but each definition can be entirely independent and arbitrary It is also possible to map individual P
102. ommand Reference page 105 IF IF lt expr gt lt statements to execute if true gt ELSE lt statements to execute if false gt ENDIF IF allows for the flow of control within a CMD or DO file based on various conditions that can be tested Refer to the page 106 A Shell Command Reference CMD and DO Files for more information Example Here is a simple example of a DO file that takes a filename argument If the file with a BAS extension does not exist it is created by making a copy of a file called APPLIB STDHDR TXT Then in either case the file is VUE d IF LOOKUP SO BAS 0 COPY 0 BAS APPLIB STDHDR TXT ENDIF VUE 0 BAS A Shell Command Reference page 65 ISMUTL ISMUTL lt fspec gt ISMUTL allows you to create a new ISAMPLUS file set or perform various maintenance operations on an existing one ISAMPLUS file sets consist of a data file with a DAT extension and an index file containing from one to sixteen logical indexes with an IDX extension Since the extensions are fixed the lt fspec gt should not include an extension and typically is just a name e g ISMUTL MYFILE If the specified file does not exist you will be prompted for information needed to create the file including umber of records to allocate Size of data record Type of key 0 1l integer 2 concatenated 3 binary Does key allow duplicates Is key allowed to change Size of key Position of key Extra index block
103. option 73 Edit history 96 EDIT function 26 27 Editing command line 13 Editor 46 EL command 46 ELSE command 47 ELSE statements 103 End of file marker 18 ENDIF 26 ENDIF statements 103 EP command 46 ERASE command 48 ERSATZ command 48 ERSATZ devices 8 EXIT command 48 EXIT statement 26 EXIT statement file 104 Extensions 8 Extensions to AlphaBASIC 25 31 37 EXTFIO SET option 73 EZPRT 15 EZTYP command 49 EZVUE 49 F FIELDEMU SET option 73 File access methods 39 dump 45 locking 64 specs 8 12 types 39 version 90 FILL function 26 FIXTRN command 52 FLIT 15 FOPENS TRACE option 77 For next loop 27 FORCE command 54 Foreground jobs 83 FPROUND SET option 73 FREE 15 Function key translations 8 28 52 95 G GDIPRT TRACE option 77 GETKEY statement 28 A Shell Command Reference GO VUE parameter 94 GOTO 15 GUI TRACE option 77 H Hard page breaks 49 Hash code 73 88 HEAD 15 HEAD command 56 Height terminal 75 HEX SET option 73 Hex values 29 History 96 HOST command 57 Host commands 57 IEDIT 27 IF command 58 IF statements 103 IF ENDIF 26 IFX 52 IGNORE PRG 19 INCLUDE nesting 36 clude 22 68 FDEF SET option 73 formix 60 I VUE 92 put CSV 33 nput raw 26 NSERT VUE command 92 Integer variables 28 Inter job communications 60 61 ISAM TRACE option 77 ISAM ISAMPLUS 22 24 26 59
104. override any other translations specify a filename with a PFK extension e g FIXTRN PILAR PFK Editing function key translation file PILAR PFK In this case it will not put the file in the LIB directory since PFK files must be loaded manually and thus can exist anywhere The procedure for editing either type of file is the same since internally they are the same format You start by specifying a special key to be used as the delimiter Pick one that is not needed in any of your translations perhaps For example Enter special delimiter key cannot be used in a translation Hit a function key or special delimiter to exit 181 Current Translation HELLO M Update y N Y Enter new translation LOG GL MRUN GLMENU M In the above example we hit the F1 key The program then echoes the numeric value returned by the terminal driver for that key 181 and displays the current translation string if there is one In the above example the previous translation was HELLO followed by the ENTER key M It then gives you the option of updating the translation In the above example we changed the translation to LOG GL lt ENTER gt followed by RUN GLMENU lt ENTER gt It then loops back to ask for a new key When you are done examining or defining translations hit the delimiter key one more time which will cause it to save the file in the current directory page 106 A Shell Command Refe
105. ower case functions see Input Case and use the concentration operator see Concatenate Parameters A Shell Command Reference page 105 DUMP DUMP lt filespec gt starting block The DUMP command is an implementation of the AMOS command of the same name for displaying the contents of files only direct disk block dumps UFD dumps and MFD dumps are not supported The format of the data dump is identical to that produced by AMOS formatted in either octal or hexadecimal depending on the current job settings see SET The current block number displayed under A Shell is a sequential count of 512 byte blocks starting at one or the specified block number Since there is no difference between random and sequential files under operating systems other than AMOS and the block linking mechanism is separated from the data itself all 512 displayed bytes contain actual data the first two or four will not contain link information as they do for sequential files under AMOS This may mean that dumping a sequential file under AMOS and A Shell which have the same hash total will produce differing outputs being shifted by two or four bytes each block Also see the notes on PAGE for how to keep the display from scrolling too fast 512 byte blocks do not necessarily have any physical significance outside of AMOS Under A Shell we simply use it as a convenient logical unit page 106 A Shell Command Reference EL EP EL lt compil switch
106. pable replacement for it Applications which contain hard coded references to LOOK might want to just create a LOOK DO file that contains LOOK DO SR EZTYP SO Status Line Information The status line displays the current line total number of lines current page total number of pages and a percentage indicating how far the current page is from the start of the file to the end This would all be very straightforward except for some performance considerations which complicate the issue But first what is meant by the current line Since EZVUE was designed to work with extremely large files it does not store the file in memory And since it does not allow changes to the file there is no cursor So there really is no particular current line However for the purposes of the status line information the current position is taken to be the end of the last line visible on the screen Next what is a page If the file has hard page breaks then an EZVUE page is equal to a printed page These page breaks will display as an entire line of WY WWW WWWWWWWWWWWWIDMDAAAAAYAAN Characters on the screen If the file does not have hard page breaks then an EZVUE page is simply a screen full typically 21 lines since 3 lines are used up by the command and status prompts Even after defining what a line and a page are we still have the problem of determining just where we are in the file This may seem strange since EZVUE looks like an editor and a
107. percentage Loading factor Data file device The questions relating to keys will be repeated up to 16 times if necessary to define up to 16 indexes These prompts are designed to be CMD file compatible with the AMOS version of ISMUTL so that any command files you have to build ISAMPLUS files will work under A Shell as they do under AMOS However the interpretation or significance of some of the parameters differs as described below The number of records to allocate is completely ignored under A Shell because ISAMPLUS files under A Shell are automatically self expanding The DAT file always starts at 0 bytes and grows with each record added The size of the data record is the same as for AMOS except that the current maximum record size under A Shell is 8196 bytes The key allowed to change option is presented for CMD file compatibility but under A Shell the key can always change It is considered the responsibility of the application to determine this The extra index block percentage and loading factor options are meaningless under A Shell since the index like the data file is self expanding and self adjusting That is not to say that it cannot benefit from reorganization from time to time but only due to deletions not to additions alone The data file device is also ignored as there is no conceivable excuse for putting the DAT file on one device and the IDX on another This was an option under AMOS where d
108. physical end of the file usually in conjunction with the a conditional statement involving IF See the notes on MOVE for an example of EXIT usage page 106 A Shell Command Reference EZTYP EZTYP lt filename gt EZTYP displays the specified file using the EZ SPOOL file viewer Although this command was officially renamed to EZVUE quite some time ago the original command name of EZTYP has been retained in the interests of backwards compatibility and ontological confusion Refer to the A Shell Setup Guide for full details on the configuration file mechanism and note that the colors may be affected by settings in the INLCLR file The operation of EZVUE EZTYP is reasonably self explanatory particularly after a glance at the help screen accessed via the key However the topics presented below following may help fill in some of the gaps EZVUE can also be accessed via EZTYP SBR or simply by including the TYPE ON parameter setting within the applicable EZ SPOOL configuration file This latter method will result in an option to preview the file being given every time your application calls SPOOL SBR The name EZVUE is essentially an alias to EZTYP and came into being to highlight the VUE like features added to the A Shell version of EZTYP command mode search capability paging etc LOOK is the name of a file viewer included with SuperVue and popular under AMOS and that EZTYP is generally speaking a very suitable and more ca
109. quivalent to XGE XGE XGE XGE TARG 1 P1 TARG 2 P2 TARG 3 P3 TARG 4 P4 Fl fl amp Fl For returning arguments xcall MIAMEX MX XCBDATA XCBADR XCBPUT 1 A B C is equivalent to XPUTARG 1 A B C The main advantage of the new statements is just efficiency both for the programmer and for the computer This is especially true if you use XGETARGS to retrieve all arguments in one statement A Shell Command Reference page 105 Note that these new statements do not require XCBADR or any of the other variables set up by XCALL BSI However you may still want to continue including XCALL BSI at the start of your SBX modules since it does set the variable XCBCNT to the number of parameters passed and the XCBSTRUCT array to the types and sizes and this information can be useful in determining how to interpret the passed parameters XGETARGS and XGETARG do not give you any obvious indication when fewer parameters were passed to the subroutine than the subroutine is expecting so a well written subroutine should at a minimum check XCBCNT to see how many parameters were passed You do need to compile with the X 2 A Shell extensions switch but this is true for all SBX modules anyway WRITECD Write Comma Delimited Variation of the PRINT statement which is useful for creating industry standard comma delimited files Syntax and operation is identical to the PRINT statement except that it performs three additional fu
110. r to XCALL in that it loads and calls an external function except that it is an expression which returns a value rather than a statement which does not Sbxname is the name of an SBX subroutine which implements the function and arg through argn are the arguments passed to the SBX routine The only special requirement for the SBX routine is that it return a value numeric for XFUNC and string for XFUNC via a special form of the RETURN statement which see above PRAGMA ALIGN8 Align MAP 1 variables on 8 byte boundaries Aligning on 4 or 8 byte boundaries may be more efficient on modern processors and can be useful for matching data layouts originating in other languages such as C But beware of the effect this can have when using map overlays For example MAP1 A1 S 5 MAP1 A2 S 5 MAP1 AX S 16 A1 Under the normal 2 byte alignment A2 will start in the 6th position of the AX overlay But with 4 byte alignment it would start in the 8 position INCLUDE Nesting INCLUDE files may be nested up to three levels deep The limit is arbitrary but was chosen based on the belief that beyond three levels things are probably just going to get too confusing to be practical As a visual aid to helping you keep track of the nesting level of lines with errors they include or in front of the line number depending on the nesting level Previously the line number was always preceded by for includes Also the Copyin
111. re typically used in IF statements or in output messages It is necessary to quote these variables when comparing then in IF statements For example IF SNU Jack correct IF SNU jack incorrect page 112 A Shell Command Reference Global DO File Parameters This is another A Shell extension that functions something like the special information variables except that their values may be set from within a BASIC program Once set they retain their value for the duration of that session unless specifically over written by a BASIC program There are 10 possible global DO file parameters and they may be invoked on a command line using 0 through 9 The DO file processor substitutes these formal parameters for their values before passing them on to the DO file For example consider the command line XYZ ONE 3 TWO 0 Assuming that global parameter 3 had previously been set to gee whiz and global parameter 0 had previously be set to humdinger then this command would be processed as if it were XYZ ONE lt gee whiz gt TWO humdinger ONE would be substituted for 0 gee whiz for 1 TWO for 2 and humdinger for 3 There is no particular limit on the size of these variables although there is limit of 200 characters on the length of any expanded command line To set global parameters use XCALL MIAMEX as follows xcall MIAMEX 79 status g0 gl g2 g3 g4 g5 g6 g7 g8 g9
112. reached control will return automatically to the host command level In this case at no point does A Shell produce a command prompt though it is possible to use the HOST command from within a CMD or DO file to terminate the execution of the command sequence prematurely The HOST command may also be used to perform a host machine function from within A Shell without exiting by specifying the command as a parameter For example host vi 0 may be used within a DO file on a UNIX machine to invoke the UNIX editor vi You will then understand why A Shell contains an implementation of VUE TRACKER which controls the screen output within A Shell is not able to monitor any output that occurs outside of A Shell and thus it is a good idea to resynchronize the display after using a HOST command by clearing the screen for example Yet another use for the HOST command is to execute a host operating system function and redirect the output to a file which is available for access from within A Shell For example the following commands will create a detailed process status list in the file ps lst which is then displayed using the A Shell EZTYP LIT utility This technique avoids the terminal handling problems alluded to above which are otherwise bothersome when trying to shell out to host operating system functions which do not know anything about the A Shell display environment host ps ef gt ps lst eztyp ps lst A Shell C
113. ree or differ This is a standard and very useful technique for verifying that a particular installation of files is up to date or not corrupted It seems amazing that there is no equivalent utility packaged with Windows or UNIX although the RPM package manager of Linux does have a similar capability The f switch outputs the results to the file VERIFY LST otherwise it is displayed to the screen The specified directory file must have been created with the DIR LIT D V H switches For example when building a release of A Shell we execute the following commands dir ashell dir dsk0 d v h k sname The k switch is needed to overwrite a previous copy of ashell dir and the sname switch adds the optional nicety of listing the files sorted by name The resulting directory listing looks something the example below with each line containing the complete filespec of a single file followed by the version number and the hash code DSKO ABOUT LIT 1 4 DSKO APPEND LIT 1 4 DSKO ASTAT LIT 1 4 DSKO ATECFG LIT 1 4 DSKO C LIT 1 4 fe C 0 103 656 123 417 74 1 111 352 256 456 10 2 131 121 772 424 00 0 100 260 132 704 07 0 100 2 118 0 100 167 604 517 71 632 367 207 57 167 604 517 71 DSKO DSKO PNRFREPENNE You may use VERIFY on this file to check if the standard files that come with A Shell are still in syne with the release versions VERIFY OPR ASHELL DIR
114. rence Hit a function key or special delimiter to exit Outputting updated PILAR PFK 537 bytes output To use the translations use LOAD to load the file into memory LOAD PILAR PFK Having done this you can now hit the F1 key and it will act as if you typed the two commands LOG GL and RUN GLMENU You can use the MAP command to check if there is a PFK file currently loaded and DEL to remove it from memory MAP Loaded private function key table PILAR PFK Free 694863 DEL PILAR PFK PILAR PFK deleted from memory IFX and VUX modules reset For more information on function keys and translation tables please refer to Using A Shell Function Key Translation in the A Shell Setup Guide Update Notes Version 1 0 102 Build 868 23 Feb 2004 FIXTRN now supports a D switch for decimal mode facilitating the entry and display of binary translations See FIXTRN for on line help A Shell Command Reference page 105 FORCE Documentation update June 2004 see Update Notes below FORCE lt jobname gt lt text gt FORCE allows you to force keystrokes into another job s input stream lt text gt is any string of characters To force control characters precede them with For example FORCE TSKAAA RUN PROG M In the UNIX environment FORCE uses the SIGUSR1 signal which can only be delivered between processes belonging to the same effective user or if the sender is the superuser Refer to the A S
115. rks by actually scanning the directory structures it will find files that do not fit the AMOS six dot three format and thus cannot be located by non wildcard commands or by BASIC file open statements DIR will truncate files with names longer than six dot three but will use some kind of flag character such as gt to give you a clue that there may be more there than meets the eye One particularly nasty problem of this type occurs only under UNIX which has case sensitive filenames Since normal files are by convention named in lower case A Shell translates AMOS filespecs which are not case sensitive to lower case But some file transfer programs may produce upper case filenames when transferring files from AMOS to UNIX Such files will appear in a DIR listing which folds the displayed filenames to upper case to match the way AMOS DIR listings appear But they will appear to be invisible to non wildcard commands and BASIC file option operations To avoid this problem make sure your file transfer program has an option to force lower case and that the option is activated To fix the problem see the trles utility which is shipped with A Shell in the bin directory In the list of switches below note that like the AMOS version you can abbreviate any switch to the minimum number of unique characters e g C for CONTIGUOUS etc Also see the PAGE as an alternative to S Q for limiting the scrolling speed of the display A
116. rols whether you can invoke a d VUE inspired feature of the same name in which the control commands S H S J S K and S L can be used to change the default cursor advance direction to left down up and right default respectively This feature can be handy for laying out forms but if accidentally invoked could wreak havoc on a blind typist which is why it is not enabled by default GO This command specifies the action or sequence of commands to execute when the file is exited with the G or GO command The sequence starts with the first command following the equals sign and continues until the is encountered The special character may be used to refer to the name of the file being edited without any extension while the character refers to the file s extension Under the standalone implementation of WUE the GO command must be limited to a single line e g GO compil MODEM This command also available from Command Mode toggles between the normal display mode and a mode in which the amount of output characters is minimized This mainly affects the way Command Mode works In standard mode MODEM OFF the entire screen is cleared and repainted when switching between Display and Command Modes When MODEM ON only the top one or two lines of the screen are used for Command Mode leaving the rest of the Display Mode screen display intact This abbreviated command mode is particularly appreciated by modem or other slow baud rate
117. s 11 PolyShell 72 POP VUE command 96 PPN 15 PPNs 8 PRAGMA 29 PRE 15 PRE command 68 PREBAS 68 PRINT command 69 Print orientation 69 Print to screen 87 Printing EZTYP 50 Privileges 8 21 43 54 60 61 72 Program name 19 Program version 90 PROMPT SET option 73 PUSH VUE command 96 PWD 15 Q Qflock sys 70 QUIT 15 page 120 QUITWARN VUE command 94 QUTL command 70 R RADSO 8 Radix 29 Random files 39 READ ONLY 28 Recall command line 13 Remote client 86 RENAME command 71 Repeat a command 87 Resource info 90 Respond VUE command 102 RETURN expression 33 RP file format 26 RW TRACE option 77 S SAVE command 71 Screen dump 68 Screen messages 102 Scrolling 68 Search path 11 SEARCHFOLD VUE command 92 Security key 62 SEND command 72 Sequential files 39 SET command 73 Shell scripts 100 Shifted status line 94 SHORT VUE command 92 SIGHUP TRACE option 77 SIGNAL TRACE option 77 Silence VUE command 102 SIZE 16 SLEEP 16 Sleep interval 19 SLEEPR 16 Slow mode 87 SOCKS TRACE option 77 Software license 62 SORT 16 Sound 41 Source file compare 79 SRCCOM command 41 START VUE command 92 Status line 49 94 Status job 60 A Shell Command Reference Status system 83 STRICT SET option 73 Strip 26 SUBMIT command 80 SUBMIT LIT 80 Switches defined 10 Syntax command 10 SYS account def
118. s This fixes transfer address out of range compiler errors Beginning with COMPIL version 1 0 112 COMPIL invokes A automatically as needed even if OPTIONS STRICT Allows the variable index area to exceed 64K AV B Send errors messages to lt source Enables use of certain BASIC statements See JBASIC Extensions Acts like M except that it reports every line in which an unmapped variable appears Turns off the display of compiler statistics Removes the internal line number references from the compiled object code making it smaller and faster but eliminating the capability for error handling routines to display the line number of the error Preserves Runtime Compatibility for AMOS even when using certain A Shell extensions eal ka K SPs otne aperon oO O a om Display source code as it is being RT This sometimes makes it easier to track down errors although the error messages always include the line numbers You may want to use the PAGE LIT utility to manage the speed of the display e g PAGE COMPIL ABC T Attempts to match duplicate AMOS COMPIL LIT 1 4 309 and higher Enables use of certain BASIC Plus syntax elements These are clarified in more detail in the section on BASIC Plus extensions below Enables the use of certain A Shell extensions to AlphaBASIC See A Shell Extensions Same as X 2 but creates an SBX file instead of RUN AV Allows the variable index area to exceed 6
119. s currently running To identify the process you may pidnol job specify either the sequence number the process id pid number or the job name which you can get by using the SUBMIT display mode with no arguments Note that unless you are the superuser you may not be able to kill any background processes other than those that you have launched AFTER ti_ UNIX only Causes the control file to be submitted via the UNIX at mspc background processor instead of as a child to the current job See note above about the at processor The timspc argument may be specified using the form M D Y HH MM The M D Y portion must be specified simply as 0 for today The optional makes the time specification relative to now Examples AFTER 0 23 00 11 PM tonight AFTER 06 30 03 00 30 12 30 AM on June 30 2003 AFTER 1 0 0 1 month from now NEXT timspc UNIX only Equivalent to AFTER timspc Windows Here SUBMIT only partially simulates the Task Manager by launching a new instance of A Shell to run the specified task This is acceptable for tasks which have explicit outputs or side effects for example a report or series of COPY commands but it does not really run in background and there is no LOG file In the Windows environment if you want to schedule a task that is launched by the operating system at the specified time you should just use the Windows Task Scheduler Programs Accessories Sy
120. s for virtually every situation without worrying about the overhead They do create some compiler overhead but is that really something we need to worry about e Even for constants that are referenced in the program constants generally save space in the RUN file A non subscripted MAP statement with an initial value takes 16 bytes and then it takes another 2 or 3 bytes to reference it in the code A constant takes zero bytes to define and generally only 2 bytes to reference Depending on the number of significant binary digits in the constant it may take 4 or 6 bytes to represent But in the vast majority of cases DEFINEd constants are small integers or powers of 2 and can be represented in only 2 bytes Strings require 2 bytes plus their length to reference as constants so in that case the use of constants may actually increase the size of the RUN assuming they are referenced multiple times e Because of the above converting MAP statements to DEFINEd constants assuming they are never assigned more than one value will result in smaller RUN files with a very slight bonus in performance at the cost of a slight increase in compile times But the main advantage comes in programming clarity when you use meaningful symbolic names for constant values in place of literal number or mapped variables Including a file containing an unknown set of DEFINEs is generally safe and should have no side effect on an existing program unless you delibera
121. s not accept or ask for user names The user name as returned by the GETJTB SBR subroutine is your user name in the host operating system environment The n switch disables the normal execution of a START CMD file in the target directory Destination may consist of all or part of a device and PPN or an ERSATZ device Examples LOG SYS LOG DSKO 1 4 LOG DSKO 1 4 LOG DSKO LOG 1 4 LOG 4 LOG MYAPP LOKUTL When LOKSER type file locking is on see the A Shell Setup Guide Configuration A Shell translates LOKSER service requests into the corresponding system locking function supported by the host operating system Under Windows non server versions there is no convenient function to display a list of the current file locks However under some flavors of UNIX including AIX and Linux a shareware utility s k is available which scans the system locking tables and produces a list of locks For those flavors of UNIX the corresponding copy of s k is distributed with A Shell or can be obtained from the web This utility by itself is not that helpful though as the information displayed is in terms of inodes rather than files and process ids rather than jobnames The LOKUTL utility acts as a front end to s k and is able to output a much more interesting display Under NT Windows 2000 and XP Server editions the Server Manager utility allows display of file locking information but this is not accessible from within A Shel
122. s specified the message is displayed in an independent pop up window using the AWMSG EXE utility which is distributed with A Shell The message window initially appears on top of all other windows and does not interfere with the target A Shell window in any way A Shell Command Reference page 79 SET The SET command under A Shell supports a subset of the AMOS display and settings as well as some extensions The functions that are fully supported are listed below followed by notes about features that differ significantly from the AMOS counterpart Entering SET with no specifications will display current settings and SET will display options The items marked below with an asterisk have no corresponding AMOS equivalent NO ABSLOOKUP NO ARASH NO AMOSRUNSER woaurorernT O OSS S S NO CDINP NO CTRLC NO DEBUG Cause RUN programs compiled with X 2 but not DEBUG to interpret the DEBUG variable as 1 or if specified EE NO EXTFIO NO FIELDEMU NO FPROUND NO LATING NO LOKSER NO STRICT TITLE definition Set top status line or window title string TRACE options Various trace options see sub command below AHASH This turns on and off AMOS compatible hash codes and applies only to text files under A Shell UNIX The default is off When on the A Shell hash routine will pretend as if there were a CR to go along with any LF line terminators when generating a hash code since UNIX text files nor
123. situations that weren t really very serious at all A Shell Command Reference page 85 SRCCOM Documentation update June 2004 see Update Notes below SRCCOM listfile oldfile newfile switches SRCCOM compares two source files reporting the differences This is useful for example when comparing two versions of a program to see what has changed between them It is most useful when the differences between the files are few when they are substantial it becomes both overwhelmed and overwhelming B Brief listing same as Q but without line numbers a Quick listing list only the lines that differ between the two files Under UNIX there is a much more powerful file comparison utility call diff and in some cases diff3 which can compare three files at a time See the notes on DIFF a front end to diff Update Notes Version 1 0 108 Build 868 1 25 Feb 04 SRCCOM LIT now includes the list file name and switches in the listing header matching the format of the AMOS version page 86 A Shell Command Reference SUBMIT To submit a task SUBMIT ctlfile do params i inifile 1 logfile ba buffile bc buffile j job w next timspc after timspc To kill a task SUBMIT K seqno pidno jobno To list tasks submitted by this job that are currently running SUBMIT The A Shell SUBMIT command is similar to the AMOS counterpart in that it causes a new process to be launched eit
124. ssible for one user to send signals to another unless the first user has superuser privileges or unless they are both sharing the same effective user ID Refer to the A Shell Setup Guide Installation for instructions on achieving this page 106 A Shell Command Reference COMPIL The A Shell compilers COMPIL and OCMPIL are optimized AlphaBASIC compilers which generate the same hash total RUN object files as their AMOS equivalents and support most of the same compile time switches They typically compile between two and ten times as fast on similar processor speed Windows and UNIX machines The only differences are in the support for certain switches and in the reporting of certain compile time errors For example the Undefined line number or label message will display just the line number or label which is missing and not the full offending source line Also the A Shell compilers report the line number which errors occur on similar to C compilers Note that although COMPIL LIT OCMPIL LIT and COMPLP LIT all have the same hash code they cannot be renamed because they retrieve their own name from the command line to determine the mode to work in However if you insist on using the name COMPIL but getting the OCMPIL functionality you can erase SYS COMPIL LIT and create a CMD COMPIL DO which executes OCMPIL LIT For maximum compatibility of RUN files between platforms OCMPIL is recommended as it remains fairly stable under both AMOS
125. stem Tools Scheduled Tasks UNIX without switches In the case of A Shell UNIX without the after or next switches A Shell launches a new process to run the specified task as a child of the current process However unlike the Windows case the new process does run in background with all of its screen output being written to the LOG file e g a file with the same name and location as the ctlfile but with a LOG extension If the parent exits before the child does the child task will continue to run but will be marked as a zombie page 88 A Shell Command Reference In the above case if there is an error during the attempt to launch the new instance of A Shell perhaps because the ashell executable is not in the PATH or the MIAME environment variable is not defined then information about the error will be written to the standard A Shell log file ashlog log in the directory where the miame ini is UNIX with switches The case of A Shell UNIX with the after or next switches is the most similar to the AMOS Task Manager The task is submitted to the UNIX at manager which like the AMOS Task Manager keeps track of it in a queue until it launches it at the specified time The process will run with the same login identity and environment as the process that submits it but since it runs as a child to the at manager it is independent of the original submitter and thus not subject to becoming a zombie As in the prior case all output tha
126. t program This would be most appropriate if the TEST PRT file was actually in comma delimited format HOST ashell ZXPWIN STEMP S DOC TEST BAS The above command launches a new instance of ashell which in turn executes the same ZXPWIN operation as in the previous example Note that we must enclose the DOC argument in quotes since the shell which will process the ashell command line would otherwise strip off the parentheses ZXPWIN C TEMP TXT vm miame miame ini This command transfers the miame ini file note the use of the native UNIX filespec to the C TEMP directory on the PC renaming it to miame txt and then launching the TXT file viewer which is probably Notepad page 106 A Shell Command Reference CMD and DO Files A Shell supports CMD and DO files more or less just like AMOS does with a few extensions which are noted in the following topics entitled Global DO File Parameters and Special Variables For readers who may not be completely familiar with CMD and DO files a brief overview is presented here CMD and DO files are basically equivalent to BAT files under DOS or shell scripts under UNIX They are simply text files with CMD or DO extensions containing LIT commands which are executed as if they were entered at the command prompt The only difference between CMD and DO files is that CMD files do not support argument substitution and macro expansion whereas DO files like their DOS and UNIX count
127. t would otherwise have gone to the screen is sent to the LOG file instead The at manager is similar to the more familiar cron manager both of which can be found on almost any UNIX Linux system The cron manager is more suited to tasks that are to be run at regularly scheduled intervals you submit jobs to it via the crontab command The at manager on the other hand is more suited to jobs that are to be run once at a specified time in the immediate or distant future To submit jobs to be run by the at manager you can use the UNIX at command SUBMIT LIT just acts as a front end to at to allow you to use the simpler AMOS command syntax A Shell Command Reference page 89 SYSTAT Documentation update November 2004 and January 2005 see T and M switches below The A Shell SYSTAT command is very similar to the AMOS counterpart and produces a display something like this Status of A Shell 32 Version 4 9 927 on Monday June 06 2005 10 25 33 PM TSKAAA TSKAAA jack DISKO 8 176 RN SYSTAT 62343 400K bytes TSKAAB TSKAAB jack DSKO 1 4 AIG Gynt 66145 400K bytes 2 jobs allocated on system 2 in use DSKO 36592 Blocks free DSK1 36592 Blocks free DSK2 36592 Blocks free DSK3 1 Blocks free 4 devices on system total free blocks may be shared among devices The lines which correspond to the individual jobs are actually formatted identically to the AMOS version of SYSTAT except that the memory size is always shown in K
128. tarting with A followed by any character followed by BC and with any one or two character extension May also be used with the P PN e g BAS 150 27 Special wildcard that matches all devices For example ALL BAS 7 6 would match all files with extension BAS in 7 6 on any device Matches any PPN For example ALL You may also omit one of the two parts of the PPN such as 0 equivalent to 0 Native Filespecs By default filespecs used in system commands are expected to be in AMOS format Some commands including all of the wildcard commands will allow you to specify a native filespec by enclosing it in quotes For example COPY HOSTS TXT etc hosts NOD TYPE etc hosts SIZE c vm miame bin ashw32 exe DIR HASH DIR vm miame bin ashell H When using quoted native filespecs you cannot use wildcards page 14 A Shell Command Reference Command Line Editing and Recall Given the syntactic complexity and advanced typing skills involved with some of these command lines you are likely to commit syntax errors or simply tire of retyping commands that you already typed just a few moments previously At that point you will appreciate the ability to recall previous command lines and re edit them To cycle backwards through the last 10 command lines hit Control R typically the same as the Page Up key To cycle forwards through them hit Control T Page Down Once you find the previously typed comm
129. tely use the defined constants There are however some scenarios to be aware of e Ifa DEFINE precedes a MAP statement for the same identifier the MAP statement will generate a syntax error because the MAP statement identifier will be replaced by the value of the DEFINEd symbol before it gets compiled For example DEFINE CTLOP ADD 1 MAP1 CTLOP ADD B 2 1 A Shell Command Reference page 105 Since the CTLOP ADD in the MAP statement will be replaced by 1 it will be compiled and a syntax error generated as if it were MAP1 1 B 2 1 e Ifa DEFINE conflicts with an unmapped variable a similar thing will happen when you try to assign a value to the variable DEFINE CANADA VAT 15 CANADA VAT 16 assignment to unmapped variable This will also cause a syntax error because it will look to the compiler as if it were 15 16 If the unmapped variable is never referenced you won t get a syntax error but then again it won t matter to your program operation either e The one case where you might have a problem is if you reference an unmapped and unassigned variable in an IF statement i e IF CANADA VAT 16 THEN This will compile as if it were IF 15 16 THEN That is a perfectly legal statement and won t be what you expected although your test of an unmapped unassigned variable probably won t be what you wanted either unless you were counting on it being zero To elimi
130. ter command gt 0 Enter ini file gt K1 DOTHIS vm miame bin LCS SKBDO i vm miame LCS SKBD1 RAD A Assuming the user input ASHELL to the first prompt and MIAME INI to the second then the DOTHIS DO file would execute HOST vm miame bin ashell i vm miame miame ini Without the concatenation the user would have had to enter the entire paths or do with the LCS function page 116 A Shell Command Reference A ABOUT command 17 ABSLOOKUP 39 ABSLOOKUP SET option 73 Access methods 39 AHASH SET option 73 Allocate 39 Allocated jobs 83 AlphaBASIC extensions 31 37 AlphaBASIC Plus 25 AMOS TRACE option 77 AMOS statement 28 AMOSRUNSBR SET option 73 AMSORT TRACE option 77 Angle brackets 101 102 APPEND command 18 ASCII numeric values 29 ASHCFG account defined 8 A Shell Editor 46 A Shell terminal emulator 20 Asbkill 61 ASHLOG LOG 84 ASTAT command 19 ATE 20 78 85 ATE TRACE option 77 ATECFG command 20 ATECTL command 20 AUTODELETE VUE command 93 AUTOPRINT SET option 73 B Background jobs 80 83 BAS account defined 9 BASERR TRACE option 77 BASIC extensions 31 37 BASIC Plus 25 A Shell Command Reference Index BAT files 100 Bell 41 Binary compatibility 11 Blocks 39 Bookmarks VUE 96 C Cache 65 Case 108 Case sensitivity 8 10 cat UNIX command 87 CDATE switch on DIR LIT 43 CHAIN 26 CHARINS VUE co
131. to be able to turn them on temporarily for a single job A Shell Command Reference page 83 without having to modify the miame ini file and re launch the session These variables accept only on or off settings Note that depending on the operating system you are running some of the options may not appear For example signals are only available under UNIX In most cases the output of the traces go to the ashlog log file in the same directory as miame ini unless specified elsewhere with the LOGDIR command in the miame ini Traces that go to the screen are noted specifically in the table below Note that any attempt to set any other parameter even if it is a valid parameter under AMOS will result in the same error message Invalid function Trace AMOS Logs information related to the use of XCALL AMOS and operations that involve the launching of another ashell session AMSORT Displays sort information ATE Logs details of the GUI commands and responses BASERR Logs all Basic errors indicating if they were trapped or not DEBUG This is a catch all for logging all kinds of information It should only be used in focused circumstances since the amount of tracing data quickly becomes overwhelming Logs information about file opens both programs and data Under Windows this also includes how many microseconds it takes to open the file which can sometimes be useful in identifying bottlenecks due to network issues GDIPRT Wi
132. to make room for the UNIX process id which displays under A Shell UNIX between the program name and the memory size The available job states are currently only RN and C unlike the AMOS version which shows many more states Note that in the list of devices one or more of the pseudo AMOS like devices may share the same physical disk device on the host operating system and thus the number of blocks free is the same In the example above DSK0 DSK1 and DSK2 are all hosted on the same device while DSK3 is apparently not accessible Switches The A Shell version of SYSTAT offers a number of interesting switches which can be listed with SYSTAT A Displays all of the allocated jobs i e those listed in TRMDEF INI even if no corresponding process has been launched a isplays only backaroundjobs SSCS 1 splays IP address This feature added in SYSTAT3 0 160 Sends the output of the display to the file SYSTAT LST in the current directory rather than to the screen This is useful when you want to examine the state of the users programmatically Displays the minimum amount of free unused memory so far in the life of each job instead of the allocated amount This can be useful in judging whether your memory partitions are reasonably sized Eliminates the display of the devices This is particularly useful when you have a lot of devices especially if some of them are slow to respond due to being offline or connect
133. ts you for a new serial number license key and company name verifies that they are correct and asks if you want to save the updated information To display the license information you may be logged into any account To update the license you must be logged into the OPR account The ATESRV switch causes LICENS to request an ATE license to be issued from the server This is only applicable when ATE is not licensed on the individual PC workstations You do not need to be logged in as OPR when using the ATESRV switch Note If you came to this page wanting to update your license only to find out that LICENS does not run the problem is that your version of A Shell predates LICENS version 4 8 build 830 of 30 April 2003 To update the license you will need to use the Old Method described in the A Shell Setup Guide In brief you will have to run A Shell from the host prompt with the start up switch k e g ashell k which will prompt you for license information A Shell Command Reference page 69 LOAD Documentation update June 2004 see Update Notes below LOAD lt fspec gt lock unlock LOAD lt common module name gt c Prior to A Shell 4 7 LOAD LIT was mostly a dummy utility used solely to load PFK modules or to clear the COMMON packet As of 4 7 however A Shell supports a user memory concept similar to that used in AMOS and thus the LOAD command now works similarly to AMOS as well except for the specia
134. uct for AMOS which keeps track of all output sent to the screen In doing so it manages to implement the 1 148 save screen area and 1 149 restore screen area TCRT calls for those terminal types that do not perform these functions in firmware Tracking is enabled and disabled with the WSET command A Shell includes a functional equivalent of TRACKER that is permanently enabled and so the 1 148 and 1 149 TCRT codes are always available for terminals on an A Shell system The WSET command is included mainly for compatibility and to prevent A Shell rejecting it as an illegal command though some of the operational switches are implemented It always responds as the AMOS version does when tracking is already enabled STRACKER flag already set Allocated TRACKER buffer located TRACKER 2 0C already installed The TRACKER M and N operational switches have been implemented ZXPWIN ZXPWIN lt pcdir gt ext lt file gt UNIX only ZXPWIN is a handy utility for A Shell UNIX users running the ZTERM terminal emulator It transfers the specified file to the PC and launches it using the Windows application appropriate for the file type thus combining two or three steps which might otherwise be done manually If the optional lt pcdir gt argument is not specified then the file is transferred to the default directory whatever that may be Otherwise it is sent to the specified PC directory If you have ZTERM B
135. uild 143 or higher you can use PC environment variables such as TEMP but enclosing them in e g ZXPWIN TEMP ABC TXT The optional ext argument may be used to force the source file extension to be changed during the transfer This is particularly useful since the extension determines which Windows application will be launched For example if you wanted to transfer a BAS file to the PC and view it in Notepad you would want to specify TXT Otherwise the default application for BAS files would probably be the Visual Basic editor which is probably not present and even if so is probably not what you wanted A Shell Command Reference page 105 Since parentheses are significant to most UNIX shells if you are going to specify a ZXPWIN command as part of an ashell command line which will be processed by the shell you will need to enclose the parentheses in quotes eg shell ZXPWIN TEMP TXT ABC BAS The file argument can be in native or AMOS format Examples ZXPWIN TEST DOC Transfer the file TEST DOC to the PC in the default transfer directory and launch the Windows application which is associated with DOC files probably Word or WordPad ZXPWIN STEMP S CSV TEST PRT Similar to the previous example except that we will send the file to the PC directory defined by the PC s TEMP environment variable and we will rename the file TEST PRT to TEST CSV on the PC so that we launch the spreadshee
136. we update these resource files which when used to re generate the LIT commands may create subtle differences which are not reflected in the version number Update Notes Version 1 0 102 Build 857 2 23 Dec 03 VERSYS LIT 1 0 102 now shows the program header flags for RUN and LIT files which indicate how the program was compiled and whether it is compatible with AMOS Note that it cannot distinguish whether A was used when compiling although it can distinguish AV which implies A and it cannot tell between X 1 X 2 and D all of which show as X and are incompatible with AMOS This version of VERSYS is backwards compatible with A Shell 4 8 A Shell Command Reference page 97 VUE Documentation update October 2004 see Special Commands below VUE lt file gt switches A Shell contains an implementation of VUE with a similar look feel and functionality to AlphaVue version 3 0 under AMOS Most basic commands and display mode features are implemented although the emphasis is on general utility and not on being a perfect emulation of the AMOS version A number of power user extended features have been added however to accommodate some of our more demanding users These are discussed following the basics under Special Commands below Enable command file input including in display mode Characters are input from the current command file and interpreted as if they were typed Note that it is critical to know which mod

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