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From: McGuire_Ed@GRINNELL.MAILNET
Newsgroups: mod.computers.vax
Subject: Parsing VMS filenames
Message-ID: <8611070905.AA03111@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Thu, 6-Nov-86 11:24:00 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8611070905.AA03111
Posted: Thu Nov  6 11:24:00 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 8-Nov-86 04:07:26 EST
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You're not going to find my answer much help, because I can't provide a piece
of code to parse VMS file names, nor have I used SYS$PARSE.  But I do feel
motivated to provide some advice (it's free :-)

Don't parse it yourself. Use the system services instead.  What happens to your
nice application program if DEC extends the syntax of filenames like they did
in V4.0 (with long name and type) and V4.4 (is that right?) with the addition
of the hyphen?  Any user-written  parsing code will probably trap an apparent
error in the file name instead of handling the additional syntax!