[Info-vax] Suggested enhancement: bypass symbol definitions when executing DCL commands

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In article <s938qc$7ed$1 at dont-email.me>, Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:
>On 2021-05-31, Hans Bachner <hans at bachner.priv.at> wrote:
>> Chris Townley schrieb am 31.05.2021 um 16:51:
>>> It was sometimes useful to add an incorrect character to avoid a symbol 
>>> definition - for example deletes
>>
>> It still is useful. If you work at various customers' systems from time 
>> to time, with setups varying from customer to customer, it is convenient 
>> to type "$ direx /qual1 /qual2" to get displayed exactly the file 
>> attributes you want for the files you want to see.
>>
>> I never found a customer system with "direx" defined as a symbol, and if 
>> it would be defined it wouldn't do much harm. On the other side, most 
>> customers have some dir* symbols defined, with and without abbreviaton.
>>
>> Similar for other commands like copy etc.
>>
>
>That's one hell of an ugly hack and there should be a far better way to
>handle this other than resorting to that.
>
>Didn't one of the other DCL implementations (maybe RSTS/E V9 onwards)
>allow the use of a leading underscore to skip any symbol translations ?
>
>Something like:
>
>$ _dir filename.dat
>
>would get you the "real" dir command without having to worry about
>symbols.
>
>I wonder if we could have something like this for VMS DCL ?

$ SET SYMBOL/VERB/SCOPE

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