Programming

[23-Nov-2023]
Some more changes to the examples:   As I mentioned in the previous post, I used to own an AlphaServer 800 as my workhorse VMS machine at... (290 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[29-Jun-2018]
Bit tests in COBOL:   It's been a long while since I've had anything interesting to post here. Mostly, my day to day occupation for the last couple of years has been maintaining the infrastructure, operating system, and ensuring business as usual continues for the company's primary application. However, I got an interesting query from an old friend today, asking if there is a way to do bitwise tests in COBOL. This was an interesting challenge that made me think outside the box! (431 words, 1 comments, 0 pings)

[20-Mar-2014]
Poor man's PCA:   Description of a solution I came up with to automatically collect program counter information in an executable image, with links to the source code. (565 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[25-Oct-2013]
SYS$ACM changed behaviour?:   Has SYS$ACM(W) changed behavior in recent versions of OpenVMS? (180 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[01-Oct-2013]
ACLSEARCH X01-07:   A new version of ACLSEARCH has been released. A fix suggested by Tony McGrath has been incorporated to handle long ACLs correctly, and I've done some reworking of the "Does this ACE match?" logic. (213 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[06-Jun-2013]
General purpose RTL examples:   After a couple of recent requests for examples of calling the OTS$ routines I've found some time and written some. Examples are now available on the Code examples page. (81 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[24-May-2013]
WATCHDIR X01-06:   Thanks to Hein van den Heuval over at HdvH Performance Consulting, there's a new version of WATCHDIR available for download. (84 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[12-Feb-2013]
EFN$C_ENF:   Use EFN$C_ENF everywhere you don't explicitly need to know when an event flag sets, and use a specified event flag (allocated by lib$get_ef) when you do. (281 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[25-Jan-2013]
How to create a guaranteed unique filename in COBOL:   I was troubleshooting an issue where the FCP call rate was showing as extremely high on a node in the development cluster. The file lookup rate in the same MONITOR FCP window showed a corresponding number, so I knew something was doing a lot of directory access somewhere. (206 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[21-Dec-2012]
RMS hack:   After converting a file that's accessed 24x7 to add an alternate key, a number of programs started crashing because the programmer's testing had failed to uncover that the field that was turned into an alternate key had its value updated under certain conditions... and the FDL used to convert the file specified no changes for that key. And how we recovered. (687 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

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