[Info-vax] Reading SYSUAF with DCL problem

[Hein RMS van den Heuvel]

On Wednesday, May 9, 2018 at 11:29:14 PM UTC-4, fredt... at gmail.com wrote:
> On Thursday, May 10, 2018 at 12:17:22 PM UTC+10, Hein RMS van den Heuvel wrote:
> > On Wednesday, May 9, 2018 at 6:23:29 PM UTC-4, dgordo... at gmail.com wrote:
> [SNIP]
> > 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.
> 

That value is not present in all UAF entries, some have the first byte as the ASCII value of the correct letter for the first letter of the owner.

Ah, that's new info. I was going with David F's suggestion about unprintable. A bit of DUMP or even 'show symbol' - which replaces unprintables by periods would have helped.

Knowing this now, it was not a lack of understanding, but indeed perhaps someone munged the column with a hack. That would be 'normal' since you indicate no proper tools was allowed to be added to the system.

>> that response was more helpful than your comment and allows me to add additional logic to correct for the possibility.

I typically do not reply without trying to be helpful.
Perhaps I should have left it at RTFM.
The helpfulness this time was in the DCL method to get at 8-byte binary dates.

Cheers,
Hein

 SYSTEM SERVICE REFERENCE MANUAL

UAI$_OWNER
Returns, as a character string, the name of the owner of the account.
Because the owner name can include up to 31 characters in addition to a size-byte
prefix, the buffer length field of the item descriptor should specify 32 (bytes).