Exiting with error / success codes to VMS Scheduler...

[Atul Chojar]

In your experience, which one of the following commands is the best one to use for exiting from a VMS DCL com script,
that is run through VMS scheduler on production servers?

$exit $SEVERITY
$exit $STATUS
$exit ($SEVERITY)
$exit ($STATUS)

[Ian Miller.]

If you do
$ EXIT
then the current value of $STATUS is used.
If you specify a value then it updates $STATUS with the value you give.

[Uwe Zessin]

If we are talking about batch jobs:
$ exit $STATUS

or something similar. That will make sure that the true condition code is reported in the accounting file.

If you use
$ exit $SEVERITY

you are trying to turn the severity bits into a condition code - that will not work and produce invalid codes.

$ exit %x2c
%SYSTEM-F-ABORT, abort
$ show symbol $status
$STATUS == "%X0000002C"
$ show symbol $severity
$SEVERITY == "4"
$ exit $status
%SYSTEM-F-ABORT, abort
$ exit $severity
%NONAME-F-NOMSG, Message number 00000004
$

[Jan van den Ende]

Atul,

Welcome to the VMS Forum!.

My personal choice would be

$ exit '$status'

Meaning: exit with the VALUE of $status.
This will directly generate the associated message, if it exists and is numeric even.

$severity contains the lower 3 bits of $status, which would result in only "%NOMSG-W-No message", "%NOMSG-E-No nessage" or %NOMSG-F-No message", depending on the seroiusness of the final status. It would prevent potentially interesting and/or informative messages being displayed!

hth,

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe

[Ian Miller.]

The difference between
$ exit '$status'
and
$exit

is the former displays the message. The same value is returned in both cases.

[Mike Reznak]

Hi,

take a look in OpenVMS help

$ HELP EXIT

Very well described there ;o)

Mike

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

1) Don't forget to put your queues "retained=error". This way you get an error entry when the job is not successful.
2) if you do exit after a delete that failed the job will fail because of a warning. So exit 1 after deletes (if noon is set, otherwise the job will abort)
3) often forgotten : subroutines require their own error handling. Default is on error then exit.

Wim

[Richard Apthorp]

Coincidently I was working on something similar so I hope you don't mind if I add a further question:

I am using lib$spawn to run a command file from a program and use exit(44) for abort if it fails.
However when I then use lib$get_symbol on $STATUS I always get the same answer of %X'10000001'

How should I be doing this? Thanks.

[Mike Reznak]

To Richard:

No problem to reply, but I'm not sure, tou'll be able to assign any points to answers to your question.

In DCL, if you use ON ERROR THEN EXIT, ON WARNING.... statements, then you get the right $STATUS value. When you redirect processing to some error handling inside the procedure, you have to save ZSTATUS = $STATUS value immediately after the command execution. The $STATUS value is changing after every command executed.

Mike

[Uwe Zessin]

LIB$GET_SYMBOL() translates the $STATUS symbol from your current process, not the subprocess. Your current image is still active, so $STATUS is not updated.

I haven't read up the details, but I think you want to take a look at the 'completion-status-address' argument of LIB$SPAWN().

[Richard Apthorp]

the main program waits until lib$spawn completes. Do you mean symbols are lost from this sub_process. The return from lib$spawn is always 1 whatever the exit status of the comman d file spawned.
What would you recommend is the best way of passing back a return value from a command file spawned from a program, Thanks again.

[Uwe Zessin]

Symbols are not shared between processes. The return status from LIB$SPAWN tells whether the SPAWN was successful.

Again, I think you want to take a look at the 'completion-status-address' argument of LIB$SPAWN(). I can't check it right now, but I think it contains the subprocess' final status (i.e. what you specify with "$ exit n").

[Ian Miller.]

From the help for LIB$SPAWN

"The completion-status-address argument contains the address of the status. The system writes the value of the final completion status of the subprocess into completion-status-address when the subprocess completes. If the subprocess returns a status code of 0, the system writes SS$_NORMAL into this address."

So if you wait for the process to complete then this will contain the status you want.

[Richard Apthorp]

Thanks thats what I need - Sorry I don't seem to able to assign any points - I guess because I did not start it. Perhaps another button could be added to allow for additional questions...