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From: LEICHTER-JERRY@YALE.ARPA
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Re: Yet another bug in VMS C
Message-ID: <8707291008.AA17919@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Wed, 29-Jul-87 06:08:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8707291008.AA17919
Posted: Wed Jul 29 06:08:28 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 31-Jul-87 02:21:29 EDT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: <LEICHTER-JERRY@YALE.ARPA>
Distribution: world
Organization: The ARPA Internet
Lines: 54


    I have discovered truly bizarre behavior in C for VAX/VMS.  The
    command-line arguments are folded to all lowercase.  The only way of
    preserving case seems to be to enclose arguments in double quotes.
    Thus a command like
    
         tr a-z A-Z 
    
    won't work.
    
    How does one tell it not to do it?  I could find no references to this
    in the index of the VMS C manual.

You didn't look in the index very hard, did you?  It took me about 30 seconds
to find the index entry "Main function, syntax of".  A quick look at the
single section that points to makes it clear that this is the place to find
the details.  Reading on, we find (page 11-31 in Programming in VAX C - the
V2.0-V2.2 version):

	DCL converts most arguments on the command line to uppercase
	letters.  However, VAX C internally parses and modifies the
	altered command line to make VAX C argument access compatible
	with C programs on other systems.

	All alphabetic arguments in the command line are delimited by spaces
	or tabs.  Arguments that have embedded spaces or tabs must be
	enclosed in quotation marks (" ").  Uppercase characters in arguments
	are converted to lowercase, but arguments within quotation marks
	are left unchanged.

This is NOT a bug in C; in fact, it has as little to do with C as the fact
that the Unix shells will interpret various metacharacters unless you quote
them.

There is no way to prevent DCL from forcing all the unquoted letters to upper
case, and there is nothing VAX C can do to restore the original case - the
information is simply not available to it.  VAX C does the best it can by
converting everything to lower case because (a) most Unix command options
are lower case; (b) file specs on VMS don't distinguish case, so changing the
case of file specs doesn't matter.  Hence, most Unix program interfaces will
work unchanged.  tr happens to be a special case.  (grep would be, too.  But
note that on VMS, unlike Unix, you don't have to use quotes to pass "*" when
in regular expressions.)

Now, repeat 10 times:

	I will not assume something isn't in the manual until I've looked.

	I will not assume something is a bug because I don't understand it.

	I will not assume something is a bug because it's not exactly like
		Unix.
							-- Jerry
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