Re: Local Versus Global Command Options

On 2/15/2025 2:22 PM, Mark Berryman wrote:

On *nix, one's program can define any command syntax desired since the command-line parsing is done entirely within the program.  The shell doesn't really do anything except try to expand unquoted wildcards (which somewhat limits the use of wildcards since the program cannot differentiate between a source wildcard and a destination wildcard).  On VMS, DCL can do it either way.  One can define a syntax that allows DCL to do the parsing as Arne has shown, or one can tell DCL to simply pass the command line to the program and let the program do all of the parsing.  One advantage of the former is that if the command-line fails to parse, the program never even has to be activated.

A VMS program has choices:
1A) SET COMM and CLI$
1B) SET COMM/OBJ, LIB$GET_FOREIGN and CLI$
2) LIB$GET_FOREIGN and custom parsing
3) Language specific way to get individual arguments
Arne