Re: QSH using QTEMP -- MIDRANGE-L


fbocch2595,

(I wish I knew what to you call you, instead of fbocch2595. Do you have aname?)

You see, QShell splits it's operation between two jobs. The interactivejob that you run the command from becomes a "terminal". Unix programs(like those in QShell) interact with a terminal using 3 different datastreams. One for input, called STDIN, one for output called STDOUT, and athird one for error messages called STDERR. When you run a QShellutility, your current interactive job becomes a terminal. That terminaltakes whatever you type and sends it to the STDIN of this other,background, job. Anything that background job writes out to STDOUT orSTDERR is copied to the screen in your interactive "terminal" job. That'sthe way QShell works.

The redirection operators change all that. When you use "ls" by itself,it prints the directory list on the screen, but when you do"ls > /somewhere/somefile" the LS command no longer outputs to thescreen. Instead, it's output has been redirected to a file. It's neversent to the terminal job.


When you try to redirect to QShell, as in your example

ls -c /ProgrammingArchive > /qsys.lib/qtemp.lib/myfile.file/myfile.mbr

Now you have a problem. The background job has a DIFFERENT QTEMP thanyour foreground job, so this can't possibly work. The MYFILE file is inyour interactive job's QTEMP, not the background job's QTEMP. Even if youcould find a way to make it create the file in the background job's QTEMP,it wouldn't do you any good because you'd have no way to retrieve thedata from it.

So, instead of having the background job redirect it's output to QTEMP,you have to do it differently. In the interactive job, you say "anythingwritten to my STDOUT screen, put it in QTEMP". In that scenario, thebackground job still thinks it's writing to the terminal, so it stillforwards it to the interactive job. In the interactive job, you have touse OVRDBF to redirect the output.


In other words, this WON'T WORK:

QSH CMD('ls -C /programmingArchive >/qsys.lib/qtemp.lib/test.file/test.mbr')


However, THIS WILL:

OVRDBF FILE(STDOUT) TOFILE(QTEMP/TEST)
QSH CMD('ls -C /programmingArchive')
DLTOVR FILE(STDOUT)

If you continue to use the > charcter to do the redirection, the data isnever sent to the terminal job, so there's no way it'll ever work.

I hope that makes more sense. I don't know how to explain it better.But, rest assured, it DOES work, I use it every day.