Re: Question Re: Piping and Redirection

Dr Syd Nicholson wrote:

Just an idea:-

Perhaps IBM could add some additional options to commands. For example,
the DSPOBJD has OUTPUT(*OUTFILE). What if it had OUTPUT(*PIPE).

Another parameter would be required to tell it where to pipe to. This
could be the name of a program, or another command capable of accepting
a stream of data.

The format of the data would not be an issue. The data is formatted for
*OUTFILE, the same format would apply to *PIPE

...

Uh, no, I (for one) am not too thrilled with this idea. In Unix,
commands use the predefined streams stdin, stdout, and stderr, all
of which can be redirected and piped (largely) without the command
being aware of the redirection. That is, the support is totally
transparent to the command itself, and no additional command options
 are necessary to support this. Adding piping or redirection
options for each OS/400 command seems like a sledgehammer approach.
Furthermore, it really doesn't make sense if there are no OS/400
commands that could process stream input!

In OS/400, the current design is that the output from the DSPxxx
commands can be directed to a database file, which can then be
processed by any program. This is appropriate since the information
output by the DSPxxx commands can be quite complex. There would be
little benefit in the ability to process that data in stream form.

Cheers!  Hans