First sets of updates to perlport.pod.
More will be needed later. I think that many of the features that are
said not to be implemented on VMS are already there if the correct DECC$
feature logicals are set and you are using ODS-5 file systems.
-John
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Personal Opinion Only
--- /rsync_root/perl/pod/perlport.pod Fri Jun 3 04:31:04 2005
+++ pod/perlport.pod Fri Oct 14 23:39:35 2005
@@ -360,7 +360,8 @@
and even on systems where it might be tolerated, some utilities
might become confused by such whitespace.
-Many systems (DOS, VMS) cannot have more than one C<.> in their filenames.
+Many systems (DOS, VMS ODS-2) cannot have more than one C<.> in their
+filenames.
Don't assume C<< > >> won't be the first character of a filename.
Always use C<< < >> explicitly to open a file for reading, or even
@@ -1057,6 +1058,9 @@
=head2 VMS
Perl on VMS is discussed in L<perlvms> in the perl distribution.
+
+The official name of VMS as of this writing is OpenVMS.
+
Perl on VMS can accept either VMS- or Unix-style file
specifications as in either of the following:
@@ -1093,18 +1097,79 @@
Do take care with C<$ ASSIGN/nolog/user SYS$COMMAND: SYS$INPUT> if your
perl-in-DCL script expects to do things like C<< $read = <STDIN>; >>.
-Filenames are in the format "name.extension;version". The maximum
-length for filenames is 39 characters, and the maximum length for
+The VMS operating system has two filesystems, known as ODS-2 and ODS-5.
+
+For ODS-2, filenames are in the format "name.extension;version". The
+maximum length for filenames is 39 characters, and the maximum length for
extensions is also 39 characters. Version is a number from 1 to
32767. Valid characters are C</[A-Z0-9$_-]/>.
-VMS's RMS filesystem is case-insensitive and does not preserve case.
-C<readdir> returns lowercased filenames, but specifying a file for
-opening remains case-insensitive. Files without extensions have a
-trailing period on them, so doing a C<readdir> with a file named F<A.;5>
-will return F<a.> (though that file could be opened with
+The ODS-2 filesystem is case-insensitive and does not preserve case.
+Perl simulates this by converting all filenames to lowercase internally.
+
+For ODS-5, filenames may have almost any character in them and can include
+UNICODE characters. Characters that could be miss-interpreted by the DCL
+shell or file parsing utilities need to be prefixed with the C<^>
+character, or replaced with hexadecimal characters prefixed with the
+C<^> character. Such prefixing is only needed with the pathnames are
+in VMS format in applications. Programs that can accept the UNIX format
+of pathnames do not need the escape characters. The maximum length for
+filenames is 255 characters. The ODS-5 file system can handle both
+a case preserved and a case sensitive mode.
+
+ODS-5 is only available on the OpenVMS for 64 bit platforms.
+
+Support for the extended file specifications is being done as optional
+settings to preserve backward compatibility with Perl scripts that
+assume the previous VMS limitations.
+
+In general routines on VMS that get a UNIX format file specification
+should return it in a UNIX format, and when they get a VMS format
+specification they should return a VMS format unless they are documented
+to do a conversion.
+
+For routines that generate return a file specification, VMS allows setting
+if the C library which Perl is built on if it will be returned in VMS
+format or in UNIX format.
+
+With the ODS-2 file system, there is not much difference in syntax of
+filenames with out paths for VMS or UNIX. With the extended character
+set available with ODS-5 there can be a significant difference.
+
+Because of this, existing Perl scripts written for VMS were sometimes
+treating VMS and UNIX filenames interchangeably. Without the extended
+character set enabled, this behavior will mostly be maintained for
+backwards compatibility.
+
+With extended character is enabled with ODS-5, it changes the handling of
+UNIX formatted file specifications to be closer to that of a UNIX system.
+
+VMS file specifications with out extentions have a trailing dot. An
+equivalent UNIX file specification should not show the trailing dot.
+
+The result of all of this, is that for VMS, for portable scripts, you
+can not depend on Perl to present the filenames in lowercase, to be
+case sensitive, and that the filenames could be returned in either
+UNIX or VMS format.
+
+And if a routine returns a file specification, unless it is intended to
+convert it, it should return it the in the same format as it found it.
+
+C<readdir> by default has traditionally returned lowercased filenames.
+When the ODS-5 support is enabled, it will return the exact case of the
+filename on the disk.
+
+Files without extensions have a trailing period on them, so doing a
+C<readdir> in the default mode with a file named F<A.;5> will
+return F<a.> when VMS is (though that file could be opened with
C<open(FH, 'A')>).
+With support for extended file specifications and if C<opendir> was
+given a UNIX format directory, a file named F<A.;5> will return F<a>
+and optionally in the exact case on the disk. When C<opendir> is given
+a VMS format directory, then C<readdir> should return F<a.>, and
+again with the optionally the exact case.
+
RMS had an eight level limit on directory depths from any rooted logical
(allowing 16 levels overall) prior to VMS 7.2. Hence
C<PERL_ROOT:[LIB.2.3.4.5.6.7.8]> is a valid directory specification but
@@ -1115,7 +1180,8 @@
The VMS::Filespec module, which gets installed as part of the build
process on VMS, is a pure Perl module that can easily be installed on
non-VMS platforms and can be helpful for conversions to and from RMS
-native formats.
+native formats. It is also now the only way that you should check to
+see if VMS is in a case sensitive mode.
What C<\n> represents depends on the type of file opened. It usually
represents C<\012> but it could also be C<\015>, C<\012>, C<\015\012>,
@@ -1126,6 +1192,10 @@
TCP/IP stacks are optional on VMS, so socket routines might not be
implemented. UDP sockets may not be supported.
+The TCPIP library support for all current versions of VMS is dynamically
+loaded if present, so even if the routines are configured, they may
+return a status indicating that they are not implemented.
+
The value of C<$^O> on OpenVMS is "VMS". To determine the architecture
that you are running on without resorting to loading all of C<%Config>
you can examine the content of the C<@INC> array like so:
@@ -1136,10 +1206,16 @@
} elsif (grep(/VMS_VAX/, @INC)) {
print "I'm on VAX!\n";
+ } elsif (grep(/VMS_IA64/, @INC)) {
+ print "I'm on IA64!\n";
+
} else {
print "I'm not so sure about where $^O is...\n";
}
+In general, the significant differences should only be if Perl is running
+on VMS_VAX or one of the 64 bit OpenVMS platforms.
+
On VMS, perl determines the UTC offset from the C<SYS$TIMEZONE_DIFFERENTIAL>
logical name. Although the VMS epoch began at 17-NOV-1858 00:00:00.00,
calls to C<localtime> are adjusted to count offsets from
@@ -1622,11 +1698,17 @@
with the pragma C<use vmsish 'exit'>. As with the CRTL's exit()
function, C<exit 0> is also mapped to an exit status of SS$_NORMAL
(C<1>); this mapping cannot be overridden. Any other argument to exit()
-is used directly as Perl's exit status. (VMS)
+is used directly as Perl's exit status. On VMS, unless the future
+POSIX_EXIT mode is enabled, the exit code should always be a valid
+VMS exit code and not a generic number. When the POSIX_EXIT mode is
+enabled, a generic number will be encoded in a method compatible with
+the C library _POSIX_EXIT macro so that it can be decoded by other
+programs, particularly ones written in C, like the GNV package. (VMS)
=item fcntl
-Not implemented. (Win32, VMS)
+Not implemented. (Win32)
+Some functions available based on the version of VMS. (VMS)
=item flock
@@ -1800,9 +1882,12 @@
$sig is 0 and the specified process exists, it returns true without
actually terminating it. (Win32)
+Is not supported for process identification number of 0 or negative
+numbers. (VMS)
+
=item link
-Not implemented. (S<Mac OS>, MPE/iX, VMS, S<RISC OS>)
+Not implemented. (S<Mac OS>, MPE/iX, S<RISC OS>)
Link count not updated because hard links are not quite that hard
(They are sort of half-way between hard and soft links). (AmigaOS)
@@ -1810,6 +1895,8 @@
Hard links are implemented on Win32 (Windows NT and Windows 2000)
under NTFS only.
+Available on 64 bit OpenVMS 8.2 and later. (VMS)
+
=item localtime
Because Perl currently relies on the native standard C localtime()
@@ -1819,7 +1906,7 @@
=item lstat
-Not implemented. (VMS, S<RISC OS>)
+Not implemented. (S<RISC OS>)
Return values (especially for device and inode) may be bogus. (Win32)
@@ -1908,7 +1995,9 @@
=item socketpair
-Not implemented. (Win32, VMS, S<RISC OS>, VOS, VM/ESA)
+Not implemented. (Win32, S<RISC OS>, VOS, VM/ESA)
+
+Available on 64 bit OpenVMS 8.2 and later. (VMS)
=item stat
@@ -1985,6 +2074,8 @@
The return value is POSIX-like (shifted up by 8 bits), which only allows
room for a made-up value derived from the severity bits of the native
32-bit condition code (unless overridden by C<use vmsish 'status'>).
+If the native condition code is one that has a POSIX value encoded, the
+POSIX value will be decoded to extract the expected exit value.
For more details see L<perlvms/$?>. (VMS)
=item times
@@ -2217,4 +2308,4 @@
Michael G Schwern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Dan Sugalski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Nathan Torkington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.
-
+John Malmberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
