[Info-vax] DCL's flaws (both scripting and UI)

[Simon Clubley]

On 2015-01-19, Craig A. Berry <craigberry at nospam.mac.com> wrote:
> On 1/18/15 3:19 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>
>> 8) You cannot delete a directory tree in one go.
>
> DELETE/TREE was added in 8.4 but DFU DELETE/TREE is much better and has
> been available for some time. Unfortunately the latter requires
> privileges over and above ownership of the directory tree involved.
>

Interesting; I didn't know that. :-)

I have not used 8.4 yet (and I am not likely to in the near future as
my current job ends in a couple of months) so I have not had the
opportunity to be exposed to this new qualifier.

>> 9) differences is very limited by today's standards. The functionality
>> in GNU diff, with (for example) it's ability to find differences in
>> whole directory trees and produce patch files for the differences
>> in an entire tree, should be the minimum baseline for functionality
>> these days.
>>
>> I also find the unified diff output to be a _lot_ more readable than
>> the output from the DCL differences command.
>
> Agreed. That's why I've been using GNU diff on VMS quite a lot for the
> last fifteen years or so.
>

I've used GNU diff on VMS as well and it's capabilities could well do
with being added into the VMS native differences program IMHO.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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