Re: RUN SYS$SYSTEM:DCL on Itanium VMS 8.2-1

Marc Van Dyck wrote:
Stephen Hoffman was thinking very hard :
-- DCL is one of the weirder images on OpenVMS

Indeed ! And that reminds me the fact that, while there is in the UAF
a field that allows you to associate an account with the command
interpreter of your choice, I have never seen any documentation or
support offered to help you write your own... Too complicated,
I presume ?


The effort involved in creating the documentation and maintaining the interfaces and the user-level effort involved in creating and debugging and maintaining and upgrading a CLI never seemed to even approach the level of the "fold", much less above it. CLIs are fully-privileged, operate in P1 space, and must field callbacks from sys$cli arising underneath various of the more familiar APIs. All certainly feasible, but there never seemed to be much call for it all.

There have been several CLIs other than DCL around. MCR and DEC/shell come to mind here, as does the POSIX shell. IIRC, there was at least one user-written CLI.

Poke around for HOW_INVOKED.C for an idea of how to use sys$cli(), and look around for a copy of sys$cli.zip. As for pointers to any examples of a user-written CLI, the last time I can recall hearing about such was back around V3 on VAX; eons ago.


--
www.HoffmanLabs.com
Services for OpenVMS
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