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From: u3369429@murdu.OZ (Michael Bednarek)
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Re: Did I Find a Bug?!?
Message-ID: <1266@murdu.OZ>
Date: Mon, 22-Jun-87 02:06:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: murdu.1266
Posted: Mon Jun 22 02:06:29 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 23-Jun-87 04:40:41 EDT
References: <8706210336.AA18429@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Reply-To: u3369429@murdu.oz.au (Michael Bednarek)
Followup-To: comp.os.vms
Distribution: world
Organization: I.A.E.S.R., Melbourne University
Lines: 40

In article <8706210336.AA18429@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> ACSCCRA@ubvms.BITNET ("Curtis R. Anderson") writes:
>$ SHOW LOGICAL FOO
>%SHOW-S-NOTRAN, no translation for logical name FOO
>
>I hardly think that was "sucessful;" more like it should be "%SHOW-W-NOTRAN"...
>
>What do you think?
 
Well, at least you got a $STATUS returned (%X10788019 I believe).

However, consider this:

You run two programs in a batch procedure. The first one reads some lines
from SYS$INPUT. It may discover that there is an error in your input,
inform you duly what it is, and exit. Leaving some more input records
in the procedure unread. Then DCL will come back and issue:
%DCL-W-SKPDAT, image data (records not beginning with "$") ignored

In anticipation of that, you have a check in the procedure:
$ On Warning then Exit
which DOESN'T exit. Why? I don't know.
It seems that the error message DCL-W-SKPDAT doesn't affect $STATUS, to wit:

$ directory foo
%DIRECT-W-NOFILES, no files found
foo bar foo
%DCL-W-SKPDAT, image data (records not beginning with "$") ignored
$ Show Symbol $STATUS
  $STATUS == "%X10018290"

(The $STATUS shown is a result from the DIRECTORY command.)

Can anyone enlighten me?

Michael Bednarek (u3369429@murdu.oz.au)

P.S.: The work-around is that I educated my users to write programs that
      exit with a meaningful status, like SS$_NORMAL or SS$_ABORT.
      But I can't do that with existing programs.