Re: how we can execute unix command from developer 2000 running under DOS/windows 95

My team recently built an application that uses the standard NT 4.0 rsh to run processes on Digital Unix. There are a number of issues you have to deal with, but we found no imcompatibilities between rsh on NT and rsh on Unix.

A summary of some of the issues you have to deal with are:

1. The identity of the user who runs the process on Unix. If you want to Unix user to be traceable to the NT user, you have to create a Unix account for each of your users. If your NT users have login names longer than eight characters, you may not be able to use your Unix's GUI user adminstrator program (we couldn't on Digital Unix). You'll have to use vipw to edit the password file, and vi or emacs to edit the /etc/group file.
2. Authentication of the remote user for the rsh call. This is an area in which it's very easy to leave wide open security breaches on your Unix server. Read your Unix documentation about the .rhosts file.
3. If you want NT to do some processing of your command line before it gets to Unix (for example, to expand NT environment variables), you should be aware that Oracle Forms's host procedure doesn't run the NT command interpreter (cmd.exe). It runs the DOS command interpreter (command.exe or command.com?). Some features that we needed were only available in cmd.exe, and it took us a long time to figure out why something we could run in a DOS window wouldn't work when we ran it from Forms. You may have to write your host procedure call like this:

host('cmd /c rsh %application_host% unix_batch_job /');

(Don't assume that the above command is exactly right. I have neither NT documentation nor my source code at hand.)

4) MKS Toolkit is an excellent package, but beware that rsh in MKS is a restricted shell, not a remote shell. If you install MKS on the NT clients, you'll have to take care that you either specify the full pathname of the remote shell command (I think it's in \winnt\system32, but I'm not sure), or make sure that the MKS Toolkit bin directory is the last directory in your users's path.

¡Espero que te haya dado unas ideas Jesús!

-- 
Larry Reid                             lcreid_at_^web.net (remove the ^)