[Info-vax] Oracle RDB 7.1.5 PRECOMP.EXE (ALPHA)

[Craig A. Berry]

On 1/28/21 9:47 AM, Andrea Arthur wrote:

> Thank you all for your input.  As was pointed out early on, this
> question was posted on behalf of someone else. I do not have access to
> the server missing the file.
> They are working on a backup solution that does not solve their
> current problem.
> 
> I've learned a few things about the lost file -
>   
> -Yes, it is Oracle 7 v7.1.5-2. (circa 1994/96) and no longer under
> support.
> -It is a PASCAL precompiler. I have found references to precompilers
> for other languages (Ada, COBOL, PL1, C, etc) with a variety of names in
> a variety of documents online.
> -The file itself, precomp.exe, was likely built during the
> installation of the Oracle 7 development pack and could be named
> anything (i.e. prepascal.exe, propas.exe, hippo.exe, etc) the installer
> chose.   I was hoping to find the facility (build_pascal.com(?))for
> building the precompiler image but to no avail.
> -Without the precompiler image, the users are unable to make
> modifications to the existing application which would require compiling
> new code.

If there is a version of DFU:

https://www.digiater.nl/dfu.html

that is old enough to run on whatever presumably ancient version of VMS
they have, it does have an UNDELETE command. It's a pretty desperate
thing to do and won't work if there's been much additional write
activity on the volume, but it might be worth a try. Note that it locks
the volume, so it could block other things going on while it is in progress.