VMS Rosetta stone for Unix admins?

[Gordon Morrison]

I've been administrating various flavours of Unix for 10 years, and I have just taken over a few VMS boxes. My VMS experience is very limited and very rusty.
I've bought a VMS Administration guide recommended by a VMS guru friend, but it's huge and it will take me a while to plow through it.
Is there an online resource similar to the "Rosetta stone for Unix" that gives translations/examples of how to do basic tasks?
Simple things like resetting passwords, redirecting output, creating/deleting users, basic network checking, looking at disks, simple loops in scripts, that sort of thing?
Thanks

[Duncan Morris]

Gordon,

welcome the OpenVMS forum!

You will find lots of good links and advice here:-

http://www.openvms.org/pages.php?page=Beginner

and there are lots of good scripting examples in the DCL site

http://dcl.openvms.org/


Duncan

[Duncan Morris]

You might also like to review these free online courses:

http://plato.ccsscorp.com/courses.html

[Robert Gezelter]

Gordon,

There is a book on the reverse.

The user manuals for OpenVMS are generally much better. You may want to look at the documentation set, including the User Manual.

The documentation set is available via the OpenVMS www site at http://www.hp.com/go/openvms

One can also check out some of my columns on OpenVMS.org.

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com

[marsh_1]

hi,

depending on your versions of vms if you send @sys$manager:tcpip$define_commands at a command prompt it will give you some of the unix network commands such as ifconfig etc.
there is also a bash shell available for vms, there is a basic writeup on equivalents here :-

http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/741

hth

[Ian Miller.]

The command to get help on VMS is HELP (not case sensitive).

This is an important clue to the differences between the systems.

See www.hp.com/go/openvms/doc - partucularly the VMS manuals whose titles start with Guide

[Hoff]

OpenVMS and Unix are significantly different in many ways, and (unfortunately) trying a direct command or conceptual translation can often lead to frustration.

Some information on creating a user on OpenVMS:

http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/856

The OpenVMS FAQ is here:

http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/1

vim is available for OpenVMS at:
www.polarhome.com/vim/

There's a microemacs port for OpenVMS around, and various folks have been working on an emacs port but I don't know the status of that.

There's a functional bash shell for OpenVMS (gnv) that can be downloaded from HP. The gnv pieces are a subset of a full bash shell, but provide a reasonable environment.

I'm not aware of a cookbook for OpenVMS for folks familiar with Unix or Linux, though there was once a "dummies" book around for OpenVMS, and there are various Unix for OpenVMS users (as was mentioned). These books are comparatively hard to find, AFAIK.

[comarow]

Terry Shannon wrote a book, Introduction to VMS which you can easily get for pennies on Amazon. It's beginner stuff but will give you an easy understanding of the syntax (grammar)
and style of the commands.

It was written many versions ago, but everything is still relevant. It will make reading real documentation much easier.

As someone pointed out, to get HELP you type help. The idea is VMS is controlled with
human, English like words. It's not a closed club where they name a command after the dog that barked when the mailman comes.

You want to search for something, the command is strangely enough Search versus
Grep. Most of your commands are also available in VMS, but it would help to get a feeling for the OS and the philosophy that
keeps an operating system around when the people that own it have been trying to kill it for years.

Terry Shannon's book, with your background will take you at most a few days.

Have fun. We can help.

[Gordon Morrison]

Thanks guys.
Mark: That page is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. (Hoff, is that your page? It's great, but incomplete. Please finish it ;o)

Bash for VMS looks cosmic, but we're running VMS 7.1-2, so it looks like it may not work as it's for 8.3.
When they do a ksh version, VMS will be perfect!

[Hoff]

What I have recommended to some long-time bash users is "forget what you know", and "forget how you do it." That way lies pain. (bash with a reasonably compatible Unix underneath is a very capable platform.)

Moving from bash to the DOS Shell or moving to DCL or to other command languages will be quite frustrating for some bash users. Particularly if the user tries to migrate and use bash-style solutions in these other environments.

Within the HP manuals, start with the User's Guide and work your way (depending on your goal) to the Programming Concepts manual or to the System Management manuals.

Yes, that's my bash DCL comparison page.

Incomplete? Yes. It'll always be incomplete. That's inherent in the comparison.

When I think of it, I do add command translations to the web page, and this when and as there are translations. DCL and bash are very different environments, particularly around some of the key constructs of Unix command shells. I use both with regularity.

As for suggestions for inclusion on the web page, have at. Either here or (probably better) over at that site. Comments are enabled on that web page for registered users on that site, and I do receive and do post the occasional random question (and answer) on that web site.

[Gordon Morrison]

On this VMS FAQ:
http://saf.bio.caltech.edu/www/vms_beginners_faq.html
I read...
"What is OpenVMS, is it VMS?

First there was VMS, then Digital added POSIX, and renamed the
operating system OpenVMS. OpenVMS currently runs on both VAX and
AXP (ALPHA) CPUs."

...and...

"POSIX is a "standard" form of Unix. On OpenVMS, if you type POSIX you
will be transferred into the POSIX subsystem, which looks pretty much
like any other Unix you are used to. Or at least, it is no more different
from other Unixes than they are from each other."

I tried running posix, but no joy. I guess this means it just wasn't installed as an optional extra, but it can be installed without too much trouble? Is POSIX included in the standard OpenVMS distribution? We're running versions 6.2 and 7.1-2

[marsh_1]

hi,

there's a good thread on this here :-

http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1246894604141+28353475&threadId=962048

hth

[Hoff]

OpenVMS V6.2 is from 1995; circa Windows 95 and c. RH2. V7.1-2 is from 1998; circa Windows 98 and c. RH5.

OpenVMS V8.3 (and V8.3-1H1 on Integrity) is the current OpenVMS release. That's from 2007 (and from 2007).

One of the larger areas of updates to OpenVMS over the last decade (and after the era of V7.1-2) has been around Unix compatibility; there were significant upgrades and additions to the C libraries and to the tools since that time.

In terms of the Unix shell products that have been available, first there was DEC/Shell. That was a V7-ish Bourne Shell.

Then came POSIX and the POSIX shell and the POSIX C APIs; that was around the time of the port from VAX over to Alpha. That was the core of the "Open" marketing of the era.

On OpenVMS V7.1 and later, you must use the POSIX V3.0 kit, which IIRC was the last POSIX kit. The POSIX product was retired at V7.2, again IIRC, and AFAIK it won't work on any recent releases. You'll need the 2.0 and 3.0 kits here.

Then gnv and bash arrived; this is the GNU-ish environment for OpenVMS, and the most recent shell and utilities port from HP.

AFAIK, OpenVMS doesn't (yet?) offer full Unix 03 compliance nor full C99 compliance.

One of the biggest issues here involves the continued use of ancient OpenVMS versions. Those are going to introduce various and sundry limitations, and in many dimensions. Now (again) don't map your Unix experiences and upgrades here, as user-mode code (that which is relatively free of latent bugs and using documented APIs) is expected to upgrade directly; no relinks required. You may (and usually will) need updated kernel-mode products installed. There are upward-compatibility statements around.

Moving applications from VAX to Alpha to Integrity is closer to a classic Unix upgrade (some Unix boxes do now have good binary upward-compatibility); you have to recompile and relink the code (and again, mapping how gcc works over will get you confused) and you may need to tweak some code that uses VAX (or Alpha) features.

[H.Becker]

>>>
I tried running posix, but no joy. I guess this means it just wasn't installed as an optional extra, but it can be installed without too much trouble? Is POSIX included in the standard OpenVMS distribution? We're running versions 6.2 and 7.1-2
<<<

VIP, VMS Integrated Posix, did not come with the OS, it was a separate kit on a separate CD, but free, or say: licensed with the OS. It would have been Posix 3.0, which was supported for 7.1 It should work on 7.1-2, but I'm not sure if that was officially supported. Anyway, support for VIP was discontinued in 1999. VIP was re-animated and hidden part of V7.2-6C2, which was the DII COE release of VMS. VIP somehow worked on 7.3 but it was never released in any form after COE. Later, the hooks in the OS for VIP support were removed. Given that history, I doubt you want to play with it, now.

You still would need to compile and install a Korn shell, but with a fully Posix compliant system as in V7.2-6C2 this was a piece of Black Forest Cherry Cake.