[Info-vax] "proper" ownership for high-level system files

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <m84pji$mlk$5 at dont-email.me>, David Froble
<davef at tsoft-inc.com> writes: 

> >> The VMS$COMMON.DIR is an alias directory entry for all of the 
> >> [SYS*]SYSCOMMON.DIR directory entries present; that's all the same 
> >> directory, and the same files.
> > 
> > Right, but actually it's reversed: all of the [SYS*]SYSCOMMON.DIR are 
> > aliases for VMS$COMMON.DIR.
> 
> Yeah, I wondered about that.  It was my impression that VMS$COMMOM was 
> the primary directory, and others aliases.  Don't know where I got that 
> idea, it's been a long time.  I could easily be wrong.

I'm pretty sure that I'm right here and not Hoff.  :-)  Of course, he 
knows much more about VMS than I ever will; I think it was just 
expressed a bit confusingly.

Of course, one cannot have several real SYSCOMMON.DIR and have
VMS$COMMON be an alias for all of them.  :-)

If you have a somewhat newer version of VMS, you can use F$FID (which is
an abbreviation for something longer, but lexical-function names can be
abbreviated) to get the name of a file with a given file-ID (which you
can get via F$FILE (again an abbreviation) from the name).  If you get
back the name you started with, then you have the primary entry. 

I was cleaning up some disks by removing old system roots by hand.  One 
can DELETE SYSCOMMON.DIR; and the alias goes away.  (As Hein explained 
here a few months ago, DELETE internally does SET FILE/REMOVE if the 
name is an alias.)  Of course, the files in [VMS$COMMON] are still 
there, and in the other [SYS*.SYSCOMMON].