Re: QSHELL SED insert

Trying to figure this out. We live in the green screen 5250e world.

You are saying that using SSH (ie: PuTTY) is the best way to work in PASE? Seems fine. It works.

You are saying that any QP2... commands are a poor choice?

We have lots of CL pgms calling QP2BATCH to shell out and run sFTP and other BASH scripts.

To test these scripts we get into *IX using QP2TERM. It's convenient.

Jerry

On 10/12/2020 9:25 AM, John Yeung wrote:

Speaking of which, I realize I am very weak in Unixy skills, but I
think the "use PASE instead of QSH" thing is way, way overblown. I
literally NEVER use the QP2* commands. If it doesn't work in QSH, then
you might as well not bother doing it on the green screen at all and
just log in using SSH already. I'd say this applies to almost all IBM
i users, and almost all IBM i use cases. If you don't already know
whether you need to use QP2*, then the odds are incredibly strong that
you do not need QP2*.

Aside from a few special commands in /usr/bin (e.g, the IBM i -specific
version of iconv) I feel this is very poor advice.

Let's clarify, for readers who perhaps don't know which advice you
consider poor, because I wrote a lot there, and it's got nuances.

We are in strong agreement that the tools provided in PASE are
superior to essentially any non-PASE counterparts, if we're just
talking about IBM i.

We are in strong agreement that proper interactive use of PASE
involves logging in via SSH.

We are in strong agreement that using the QP2* commands is very poor advice.

We are in agreement that the QSH command is best limited to CL programs.

The main difference I perceive in our positions regarding the passage
quoted above is that I've implied that it's OK to use QSH to issue
Unix-style commands, *including standalone PASE commands*; whereas you
believe QSH's only legitimate use is to launch PASE *scripts*.

One thing to keep in mind when reading my original passage is that I
was trying to address the conflation of "PASE" and "QP2TERM". A lot of
midrangers think almost exclusively in terms of 5250 sessions, and
they often have the idea that THE way to access PASE is through the
QP2* commands. This is, at best, an extremely outdated view based on
the idea that QSH *only* calls RPG (or other native-OS/400)
re-implementations of Unix-style programs, while QP2* calls "true"
ported-from-AIX PASE programs. There was also a vaguely related idea
floating around that you use QSH "when you want to work in EBCDIC"
whereas you use QP2* "when you want to work in ASCII". Again, I don't
know if that was ever a reasonable mental model to have, but I
certainly don't think it's a good one to have today.

John Y.