Using Commands Specific to an Operating System

How to:

A Dialogue Manager procedure executes commands that are specific to an operating system. Operating systems include IBM i, VM, MVS/TSO, Windows, UNIX, and OpenVMS.


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Syntax: How to Execute Operating System Commands Within a Dialogue Manager Procedure
[operating system] command

where:

[operating system]

Specifies the operating system. Possible values are:

-AS/400 or AS/400 or CMD specifies the IBM i operating system.

-CMS or CMS specifies the CMS operating system.

-DOS or DOS specifies the DOS operating system.

-TSO RUN or TSO RUN specifies the MVS/TSO operating system.

-UNIX or UNIX specifies the UNIX operating system.

-VMS or VMS specifies the VMS operating system.

-WINNT or WINNT specifies the Windows NT operating system.

-SYSTEM, ! or CMD for an operating system request to a non-specific operating system. Note that ! does not work when the exclamation character is not is the same code page code point position as the US code page (typically, but limited to European and Turkish EBCDIC pages) so should be avoided if an application might be deployed in environments such as these.

command

Is an operating system command.

Specifications starting with a dash (-) are executed in the normal flow of Dialogue Manager commands. The dash syntax for operating system specific commands are unique in that non applicable dash syntax is ignored on non applicable operating system . For example, –WINNT is ignored on a Unix operating system such as Linux, Solaris and HPUX and AIX as is -UNIX ignored on Windows. The non dash syntax for passing specific operating system commands are actually an alias for CMD and are not actually operating system specific. They require use of &FOCMODE and –IF GOTO logic if a command (or file syntax it uses) is actually operating specific. Commands that do not start with a dash (-) are stacked until execution is forced by an end of file or a -RUN. Note that there is no -! feature.



Example: Copy a File on UNIX and Windows

The following is an example on how to copy a file on both the UNIX and Windows platforms.

-UNIX cp myhold.ftm myhold-original.ftm
-WINNT copy myhold.ftm myhold-original.ftm

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