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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 5/31/2021 2:10 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> 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 ?

DCL does have:

$ set symbol/scope=(nolocal,noglobal)

Arne