[Info-vax] General VMS enhancement ideas for VSI

[Simon Clubley]

I've been looking at the DCL issue today; no firm answers yet
(although thankfully it's now looking less likely to be
exploitable now I understand the root cause better [*]) but I do
now have a series of enhancement ideas for VSI. :-)

1) The dump/record and SDA examine hex dumps are hard to read as
the hex part of the dump is the reverse of what you would expect
these days. It's nice if you have little endian longwords to read
but for everything else it's a real pain.

Can we have an option to switch the output order on the hex dump ?

2) The SDA examine command really needs a paging option; bonus points
if you can specify a string to be highlighted when found in the output
(this would be really useful for highlighting addresses in the hex
dump, for example).

3) SDA (and the other interactive VMS utilities with a command history)
really needs an incremental history search option. It should really
be something closer to bash and not the convoluted command searching
process you currently have to go through in DCL itself.

4) Is there a way to keep a process around (but inactive) if it fails
while SDA is examining it ? I'm thinking maybe through SDA expressing
an interest in a process by taking out a DLM lock so that VMS would
not release the resources allocated to the process while there were
any locks active.

Note that set process/dump does not work if it's DCL itself that
goes down.

Thanks,

Simon.

PS: [*] If it's what I currently suspect it is, then there are still
some questions to be asked however about if this behaviour occurs
elsewhere in VMS, including maybe in DCL.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world