[Info-vax] DIR/DATE_FORMAT=DELTA ?

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

Pierre wrote 2012-01-10 02:22:
>> The output of the DIRECTORY command is basically the result of a
>> F$SEARCH loop.
>>
>> Asking for times in delta format probably means that this output
>> would get parsed afterwards for some kind of processing.
>>
>> This is a bad habit and should not be done unless unavoidable. Over
>> the years, many lexical functions have been added to DCL in order
>> to avoid output parsing in most situations. Parsing output files in
>> DCL brings man back to Unix programming levels, a thing of the past ;-)
>>
>> In this case, I would say - forget the DIRECTORY command, do your
>> own F$SEARCH loop, use F$FILE_ATTRIBUTES and F$CVTIME to produce
>> your list if you need so. And if the list was only needed to be
>> processed afterwards, forget about it completely and embed the
>> processing directly within the F$SEARCH loop itself.
>
> you are absolutely right, the output will be passed to some afterward
> processing : what I do is a super-poor-man, super-lazy monitoring of
> some files which should be at most 2 days old.

"2 days old" as in "since Sunday" or as in "48 hours old" ?

Dir/since="-2-" maybe ? That is a roling 48 hour limit.



  this is done by having
> a batch that runs every day around midnight and which main action is:
>
> $ PIPE DIR/DAT/SIZE=UNIT=BYTE somewhere:somefiles | MAIL SYS$PIPE /
> SUBJ="MONITORING" "user at host.domain"
>
> but being lazy, I dislike doing the math in my head each and every
> day, for each and every line of the mail.
> of course, I can (will?) rewrite this one-liner with a DCL loop, a
> bunch of calls to F$FILE, F$FAO, F$PARSE, F$UNIQUE, F$TIME, F
> $DELTA, ...,  write the result to a temporary file that I will mail
> and not forget to delete afterward, but DIR/DAT=(CREATED,FORMAT=DELTA)
> would have been handy.
>
> FWIW
> Pierre.