Re: QSHELL commands (was: Stmf copy with add)

On Mon, 15 Oct 2001, James Rich wrote:
>
> Hmm... If I choose option 5, then exit, then press F9 I get:
>
> STRSEU SRCFILE(BMERAWO/QRPGLESRC) SRCMBR(WO5100IR) OPTION( 5)

Errr, that's a good point.  What I did is the equivalent of using
option 2 from PDM, not option 5 :)  (you'll have to forgive that, I
_never_ use PDM... yuck)

> Unless you are using tcsh or bash in which case you type in:
>
> vi /u[tab]lo[tab]e[tab]myf[tab]
>
> and let the shell fill in the rest for you.

True.   and if you're unsure of the spelling in tcsh, you can press
Ctrl-D to have it tell you everything that matches what you've typed
so far, which is also useful.

There's no doubt that tcsh (and probably bash as well, though I'm not
as familiar with that) is a nice shell.   You won't get arguments from
me there...  I love my FreeBSD machines :)

But, on the other hand, OS/400 has some advantages too.   The "prompt"
capability is certainly one of them.   It's unusual that someone is
familiar with all of the nuances of every command that they need to
use, yet figuring it out when hitting F4 solves that problem.

> An equally interesting topic is why the *$#% IBM decided to go with such a
> flat filesystem.  I honestly don't understand or know of any reason to do
> so.  It seems to me that a deep filesystem (one with many levels of
> directories) is an advantage.

Yes...  I've always thought that that was a mistake on IBM's part.  But,
you do have to remember that the origins of the IBM midrange computer's
filesystems go back to punch cards.

If you had been using punch cards for 10 years, you might find that a
filesystem like UNIX or even DOS uses would seem inordinately complicated.
Having to write your programs to account for varying length directory
names would make it significantly more complicated for the programmers.

Sure, for todays generation, the OS/400 filesystem seems too flat.  But,
when you think about what things were like 30 years ago, you begin to
see why...

And of course, the IFS was introduced to try to help those of us who
prefer something a bit deeper.

> > Also, you can type STRSEU by itself to bring up the last member that you
> > changed, which isn't as simple in Unix.
>
> Well SEU is a program that runs, not a command syntax.  You could
> certainly create a program that opened the file you modified and run it on
> a unix system.  The underlying OS has nothing to do with that.
>

True.   You could likewise create a program in OS/400 that allowed
you to display a source member without having to type a long, awkward
command string.

That's why programmers are so cool :)