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

[Simon Clubley]

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 ?

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.