Small Program To Return Single Keystrokes

[Robert Atkinson]

This is a plea to the programmers out there for a small program to return the ASCII value of a key-press, or to time-out after a given amount of time.

Basically, I want to capture the cursor keys being pressed and feed that into a DCL routine. If this is already achievable in DCL, I'd be interested to know how.

Happy to take any language, as long as it's pre-compiled to OBJ (if necessary), PERL is also fine.

Thanks in advance, Robert.

[Joseph Huber_1 · Accepted solution]

If nothing else, I have saved 2 programs in my "little utilities" archive at

http://wwwvms.mppmu.mpg.de/~huber/util/main/

Look at getkey.for and taste.for, (and make_*.com, *_table.cld).

If You need Alpha .obj, please reply.
Alpha executables are present in
http://wwwvms.mppmu.mpg.de/util/exe/taste.exe
and getkey.exe.

[Robert Atkinson]

Superb stuff!!!

Any chance of getting a timeout added to BAS$INKEY?

There are some excellent utilities there - expecially like the read/write mailbox ones. Why don't you submit them to Hunter Goatley or OpenVMS.org?

I'm sure people would find them really useful.

Rob.

[Ian Miller.]

See http://www.encompasserve.org/~miller/rk.zip

[Ian Miller.]

I have just uploaded an updated version of RK with allows specification of the symbol name and the timeout value. Its a Q&D program but seems to work.

[Robert Atkinson]

Ian, that appears to work perfectly.

For completeness, could you capture the "%SYSTEM-F-TIMEOUT, device timeout" and return it in the symbol as "TIMEOUT" instead of the error message?

Sorry guys - I know I'm being a pain here.

Rob.

[Joseph Huber_1]

>Any chance of getting a timeout added to BAS$INKEY?

I know too little about DEC Baswic implementation and the call standard to implement it. If You have time to read the Basic ref. manual, and have time to play, then try to insert arg 2 or 3 of bas$inkey to see an effect.
And in taste.for it can easily be implemented by combining it with Ian Millers code, just add it in arg 4 of the smg$read_keystroke call. To add it as an option takes a bit more time, maybe this evening ...

>There are some excellent utilities there - >expecially like the read/write mailbox ones. >Why don't you submit them to Hunter Goatley or >OpenVMS.org?

Well finding the time to package it ...
There is a pointer to my dite in the OpenVMS FAQ already ( http://wwwvms.mppmu.mpg.de/vmssig/src/ ), which in turn has a link to my personal stuff.

[Ian Miller.]

I have updated rk to set the symbol to TIMEOUT.

[Ian Miller.]

Joseph, would you mind if I added a link to your page to this page
http://www.openvms.org/pages.php?page=OpenSource

[Robert Atkinson]

Cheers Ian and Joseph - you're both absolute stars.......and I give you whole-hearted permission to go out an have a beer tonight :-)

Rob.