Interfacing Eunice I/O redirection and VMS programs

[Ted Hopp]

> Can somebody tell me if (and if so how) it is possible to interface Eunice I/O
> redirection and VMS programs?  In specific I would like to take the supposedly
> "standard output" of a program compiled under VMS Fortran and stuff it into
> a Eunice pipeline, or to have the standard input of said program come from
> a Eunice pipeline (or to be redirectible from/to files with < and >).  

Eunice under VMS 3.x doesn't provide this capability, and if it can be
implemented, it isn't easy.  We tried and eventually gave up, settling for
some compromise schemes for capturing I/O by running command files, &c.,
that didn't fit the Unix model of pipes.

The Eunice release for VMS 4.x has fixed the problem (more or less) with
an enhanced "vms" command.  You can now do things like:

> vms dir | more

which will pipe the output of the vms "DIR" command through "more".  You can
run your own program with:

> vms run myprog | ...

As long as your program does I/O to SYS$INPUT and SYS$OUTPUT, it will
participate in the pipeline.  This probably isn't exactly what you
want, but it's the closest Eunice provides (as far as I have been able
to tell).

Unfortunately, detection of broken pipes still isn't working, but that's
another story.
-- 

Ted Hopp	{seismo,umcp-cs}!nbs-amrf!hopp