At 5:45 PM +0100 1/30/04, Dominique Dumont wrote:
>
>I hope that this is the right mailing list. Apologies to everyone if
>I'm wrong.
Running things written in Perl on VMS is exactly what we're about
here. Welcome.
>I'm trying to push usage of perl and psh (perl shell [1]) at work to
>provide a unique interactive interface on several OSes. I must verify
>that these programs work on HP-UX, Linux and VMS.
>
>For perl, it's ok. But I'm quite worried about Psh. There's no
>specific port of Psh on VMS. Only a Win32 port.
>
>Since psh uses fork/exec to perform job control (in the Unix layer),
>there's a chance that it does not work on VMS.
You're right. There's no fork. There is exec, though:
$ perl -e "print exec '$show time';"
30-JAN-2004 14:56:47
>Has anyone tried to use it on VMS ?
I'd never heard of it until you mentioned it. I've downloaded and
taken a quick look and I think you have your work cut out for you.
The Makefile.PL needs a complete rewrite to handle filenames in a
portable fashion for starters. It wants to use Term::Readline, which
I don't think has been ported to VMS either, but could be wrong about
that. In lieu of fork(), the Win32 port appears to prefer
Win32::Process::Create but chooses system() when that's not
available, so there's hope a VMS port could also work based on
system(). The whole package could use refactoring with portability
in mind; as it stands now, any third port would probably have to
duplicate significant chunks of Unix- and Win32-specific code without
any clean way to reuse pieces that are already there.
>On my side, I'll try it Monday on a VMS machine (wish me luck: I've
>haven't used VMS for 18 years). I'll keep you posted on problems I may
>have.
While there have been about a million improvements since then, simple
navigation should still be the same. There are links to the FAQ and
the complete documentation from <http://www.hp.com/go/openvms>. If
you are just looking for a basic unixy shell and a few utilities on
VMS, see <http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnv/>; that could help you
find your way around, but could also be a suitable alternative to
Psh, depending on what you need.
--
________________________________________
Craig A. Berry
mailto:craigberry@xxxxxxx
"... getting out of a sonnet is much more
difficult than getting in."
Brad Leithauser
|
