[Info-vax] turning verify on and off

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2013-02-03 11:42:05 +0000, Phillip Helbig---undress to reply said:

> I have some batch jobs which constantly execute in a loop.
> Occasionally, I want to turn verify on for a while then turn it off
> without resubmitting the job, in order to test things.  What about
> procedures which call other procedures etc?  Obviously one needs
> something more refined than turning verify on or off in all the
> procedures at once.  I've thus come up with the following scheme.  I've
> stolen bits of it from other folks, but haven't seen one quite so
> complex as this.  The functionality should be obvious to DCL
> programmers.  I welcome comments for improving it.

Are you seeking to add complexity to that verification procedure, or 
are you looking for a simpler approach?   If the latter, I rewrote 
sys$manager:sylogin.template and a few other DCL procedures a while 
back, and you can see the one-liner that I tend to use in that.  Stick 
that line inside a loop, and you're off and verifying.

If you want to add a somewhat more practical form of complexity to your 
DCL, add the ability for the procedure to periodically checkpoint 
itself, and to restart.  That helps with recovering state from a reboot 
or crash or restart, too.  That also means your long-running procedure 
can be force-exited or deleted, and then restarted how and as needed.  
In a batch procedure, the SET RESTART_VALUE command can sometimes be 
useful.  There are other ways to perform this checkpoint-restart, too.

> Does anyone have anything functionally equivalent in some unix shell?

See the signal and trap built-ins in bash, and the DEBUG trap.  Or send 
a SIGUSR1 or SIGUSR2, etc.  It's not just bash that uses these, either. 
 One the daemons I work with regularly is coded to trap certain signals 
to change the running logging level, for instance.



-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC