Vic,
If you want to determine the severity of the completion status, just look at the severity bits - they're the low 3 bits of the status value (see Chapter 6 of "OpenVMS Calling Standard" for complete details):
$ some-command ! could be BACKUP
$ STATUS=$STATUS
$ SEVERITY=STATUS.AND.7
There is also the DCL symbol $SEVERITY, but it and $STATUS get set after every command, so if you want to capture the full status you need to save $STATUS immediately after the command of interest.
Severity values are:
0 = Warning
1 = Success
2 = Error
3 = Informational
4 = Fatal
5,6,7 undefined
Using severity is a much more reliable way of checking for fatal conditions than attempting to enumerate all errors (the list is potentially large and subject to change).
However, if you really want to do that, there are several ways. The simplest is to consult a source listing. But, if you don't have access to one, you can use the structure of condition values to help. A status value has several fields.
bit 0 is success/failure
bits 0-2 are severity
bits 3-15 are the message number
bits 16-27 are the facility number
bits 28-31 are control flags
So, looking at the status value for any BACKUP error, you can determine the facility code for BACKUP is %X00A30000. You can use this to determine all FATAL errors for BACKUP using F$MESSAGE:
$ msg=%XA30004 ! First possible fatal error
$ loop: WRITE SYS$OUTPUT F$MESSAGE(msg)
$ msg=msg+8
$ IF msg.LT.%XA3FFFF THEN GOTO loop
Pipe the output into SEARCH to remove all the "NOMSG" values. I get 923 possibilities on OpenVMS V7.2-2 - you won't get all of them in practice, but hopefully it illustrates why enumeration is not a good solution to your problem!
A crucible of informative mistakes
