topic Re: VMS BASIC program not writing out the last record in a file in Operating System - OpenVMS

VMS BASIC program not writing out the last record in a file

jme0909 — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 13:49:13 GMT

I ran into a weird problem with a BASIC program where when the program is run manually it works fine. All records in the input file are accounted for in either good output or bypass/error files. But when the same program is run within a DCL script it is omitting the last record in the file. It doesn't get written to any of the output or error/bypass files.

I've run it into debug several times and it reads every record and outputs every record. I've tried all the obvious solutions so far - recompiling, etc, with no luck. Any ideas why this would be working manually but not within a script? Is it possibly system-related?

Re: VMS BASIC program not writing out the last record in a file

Steven Schweda — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 21:17:43 GMT

Re: VMS BASIC program not writing out the last record in a file

Hein van den Heuvel — Sat, 28 Sep 2013 09:03:55 GMT

>> - recompiling,

Hmm, you call is "obvious solutions", I call it "Insanity" as per Einstein's defintion:

'doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.'

>> All records in the input file are accounted for in either good output or bypass/error files.

The is precious litle information to go on here.

How is the input read? INPUT or GET statements?

Through a process permanent file (file opened by DCL, for example SYS$INPUT)

What kinda inpu file? (If you don't understand the question, attach DIRECTORY/FULL output)

Is the last record special, for example for a stream-lf input file the last record sometimes does NOT have a formal terminator (Compare DUMP/BLOCK=START=... with DUMP/RECORD=START=...)

Surely the program has a loop, which likely terminates on an EOF condition.

Does that last record trigger an EOF pre-maturely.

How about adding a simple record count + display after the loop.

How it the output written? PRINT? PUT? Regular 'OPEN'ed file? Need a final CLOSE (or FLUSH) ?

Deferred write? Write-behind?

Show us some core code? OPEN, Loop, GET, eof-test, CLOSE?

Hein

Re: VMS BASIC program not writing out the last record in a file

Tom Wetty — Sun, 29 Sep 2013 22:06:33 GMT

Hi as Hein says is this an RMS record or SQL or Stream file ?

Do you move the mapped buffer to another in order to display it ? Is the display a print statement ? Especially on error handling.

Does the program do a system call to the DCL error on end of file, is end of file status hard coded or do you use a library value for the error code ? This is most important since it would explain interactive vs command procedure driven behavior.

Please provide much more info about the file access, and error handling in the code; perhaps code samples or mock up if necessary

Without this it is not possible to answer your questions.

Thanks!