Re: Incresing command line length from max. 256?

In article <1993Aug9.125902.1555_at_mwk.com> kneitz_at_mwk.com writes:
> In article <1993Aug6.214257.11208_at_govonca.gov.on.ca>, murrays_at_govonca.gov.on.ca (Scott A. Murray) writes:
> >
> > (posted for a co-worker)
> >
> > Is it possible to increase the VMS command line size? We have an Oracle
> > application that is 'shelling out' to VMS to run another Oracle application
> > (we have our reasons). The problem is that VMS can only accept a maximum of
> > 256 characters on the command line. We need to pass parameters on the
> > command line that far exceed this limit. Is there a way to do this? Either
> > by somehow increasing VMSs command line limit, or some other way?
> >
> > Thanks for any information you can provide.
> >
> > Scott
> > --
>
> $ PART2 = "Another long string..."
> $ PART3 = "Yet another long string..."
> $ Command 'part1' 'part2' 'part3'
>
> This will get you up to ~1200 bytes (I think). Of course the symbols
> can be defined using LIB$SET_SYMBOL and the actual command with the
> 'sybmol' substitution requests can be passed to LIB$SPAWN.
>

As you said, this will get you only upto a certain point. I think the best thing to do is to pass in data via data files. Yucky as it may seem, it remains IMHO the most flexible way to do this on VMS. You'll find that other "workarounds"( such as the one above ) will be back to get you one day far into the future, when the application fails with some funky error message( "%RMS-W-TNS, Terminator not seen") that you'll spend hours/days trying to locate !

Lalith Received on Mon Aug 16 1993 - 22:08:03 CEST