[Info-vax] Possible bug in OpenVMS 8.3

[John Santos]

In article <h7bsbg$3ka$1 at news.eternal-september.org>, 
jeffrey at digitalsynergyinc.com says...> 
> David J Dachtera wrote:
> > "Jeffrey H. Coffield" wrote:
> >> I found that if you use a lower case string for the SJC$_USERNAME in an
> >> itemlist for SYS$SNDJBCW the job gets submitted but will not show up
> >> when you do a "$ SHOW ENTRY/USER=xxx". It does show when you do
> >> "$ SHOW QUEUE/ALL queuename" and shows the username as lower case.
> >>
> >> This was on OpenVMS 8.3 on Itanium.
> >>
> >> Jeff Coffield
> >> http://www.digitalsynergyinc.com
> > 
> > That might not be a "bug", as much as a case-sensitivity issue.
> > 
> > "DAVID" != "david"
> > 
> > Hence, trying to do such a match will always fail.
> > 
> > Try:
> > 
> > $ SHOW ENTRY/USER="xxx"
> > 
> > ...and see what happens.
> > 
> > D.J.D.
> 
> I did a little more tesing on OpenVMS 8.3 on Alpha an found that
> submitting a job with my username in lowercase does not show up when I
> do either
> 
> 	$ show entry
> 
> or
> 
> 	$ show entry/user=myusername
> 
> but does show up when I do
> 
> 	$ show entry/user="myusername"
> 
> but the last one then doesn't show other jobs that I have submitted. If
> not a bug, then I would say a non-obvious quirk.
> 
> When the job does run, it has my username in uppercase at the end of the
> log file before the "job terminated at" date/time and the accounting
> utility reports the username in uppercase.
> 
> 
> Jeff

The correct solution depends on whether VMS usernames are case-blind
or case-preserving (if those are the correct terms.)  By case-blind,
I mean VMS doesn't care what case you use to specify a username, it
always works.  In that case, it could either preserve the case you
specify in the submit, but always do case-blind compares when you
examine it, or it could standardize the case when you submit the
job, and standardize the case of the value for the /user=<value>
qualifier on show entry.  If it is case-preserving, it should change
the case to match the way it is specified in the UAF, and then do
case-blind matching in show entry/user.  (It has to check the username
parameter on the SUBMIT against the UAF to determine if it's valid,
and it does a case-blind compare, so all it has to do is use the
UAF version when creating the queue entry.)

I've never seen a VMS username that wasn't UPPERCASE, but maybe
that's because you need to use quotes to create a lowercase or
mixed case UserName, and I've never tried that.

The other possibility is case-sensitive usernames, which seems to
be the way show entry is acting, and which is clearly wrong and
a bug...  VMS is not case-sensitive when you log in, and mail
(both local VMS mail and SMTP) explicitly treat user names
as case-blind.

(I bet this bug has been there forever, but no one noticed it
because with DCL parse-style set to traditional, DCL would always
upcase the username unless you quoted it, and people using $SNDJBC
just assumed they needed to upcase the username, or just never
noticed...)

-- 
John Santos
Evans Griffiths & Hart, Inc.