RE: CMD prompt question

Thanks Doug, I think everyone here is fine with this...  We'll document the
usage requirement and go from there.  I am looking a bit at the Command
Analyzer Change exit program, and it seems this _MIGHT_ work for what I
need, but I need to research more to know for sure.  Still, it's a lot of
work for a very uncommon problem that is easily corrected in the command
string.

Eric DeLong
Sally Beauty Company
MIS-Project Manager (BSG)
940-898-7863 or ext. 1863



-----Original Message-----
From: Douglas Handy [mailto:dhandy1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, January 19, 2004 9:56 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: CMD prompt question


Eric,

>The boss thinks this is a bug in the email utility, so he asked me if I
>could fix it....  

It is a bug (feature?) in whatever is generating the command string to
invoke
the email utility.  The OS command parser naturally requires quotes around a
parameter value with embedded blanks.  But it also requires quotes around a
value with certain non-blank characters, including the hyphen.  This is
because
it could be construed as an expression rather than a character string.

Note that is at the command parsing stage, and has nothing to do with the
command prompter.  For example, type this command and press Enter:

  SNDMSSG MSG(e-mail) TOUSR(*SYSOPR)

and you'll get CPD0104 (Expression not allowed for parameter MSG).

>I'm not sure I disagree, except that this seems to be
>standard behavior for command prompts.  

It is standard behavior for parsing command strings, whether or not
prompted.

>Anyway, command prompts are NOT a specialty of mine, so I'm fishing for
>ideas.  Could a command validation program help with this?  

No, because it doesn't get that far.  The problem is that the OS won't treat
a
non-quoted value containing a hyphen as a string, it treats it as an
expression
and the hyphen as a subtraction operator.

Just change your program building the command string to always add quotes;
they
never hurt anything.

Doug
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