[Info-vax] Reading SYSUAF with DCL problem

[Hein RMS van den Heuvel]

On Wednesday, May 9, 2018 at 6:23:29 PM UTC-4, dgordo... at gmail.com wrote:
:
> If you're having trouble with counted strings, just wait for the headache of quadword time fields in DCL. 

Indeed, someone trying binary interpretation of SYSUAF should really understand counted strings, and to one acceptable response is 'Duh - I knew that', not fighting back with a lame 'I wonder why some UAF$T_OWNER starting at 84 are the correct ASCII character for the "real" owner name? '
That't the definition of ignorance (of computer principles in general and OpenVMS in specific) right there. Sorry to be blunt.


> I'll give you a hint - don't bother.  Hopefully fixed in a future CLI or other scripting language.

Actually, there is a long established hack for this. 
It is possibly time to remind folks.
Here is a snippet of code to see it the password was updated less than 24 hours ago

$ yesterday_compare = F$CVTIME("-1-")
$ pwd_binary  = F$EXTR(380,8,rec)
$ pwd_compare = F$CVTIME(F$FAO("!%D",f$cvui(32,32,f$fao("!AD",8,pwd_binary))))
$ IF pwd_compare .GTS. yesterday_compare THEN ...



> You're better off parsing the output from AUTHORIZE SHOW * 

yeah... most of the time that is the easy / better way out.


Cheers,
Hein