Calling QShell utilities directly - more thoughts

Recently I suggested using a CALL to program MV in library QSHELL. Responses were appropriately cautionary, so I did a little more digging, which included looking more at the QShell Reference and checking with partner support at IBM.

The newest bit of information comes out of the Reference and is rather interesting. It says that QShell is an extensible environment - that we can write our own utilities. These can be in any high-level language, with C/C++ and Java being preferred. And here is a key statement that is rather suggestive and may bear somewhat on direct calls of the utilities that IBM provide -

"If your utility program uses the ILE/C or ILE/C++ standard files for I/O, you can run your utility from either the qsh command line or the QCMD command line."

So I'm thinking that if IBM's utilities do the same, we can run them as I suggested.

IBM Support did say that QShell relies heavily on environment variables and internal tables that are used for applying CCSIDs to the processing of commands. Still, the door is left open for direct calls, if those elements are not needed. Not sure how we would know that, except by experimentation at this time.

A prototype for MV could include, IMO, 2 or 3 character parameters - 1 each for source and target, and 1 optional for one of the flags.

Anyhow, food for thought, perhaps.
Vern