Problems with DCL Symbols - symbols

I have been using VMS/OpenVMS for over 30 years now. I found something interesting yesterday.
I always have symbols PU*RGE :== PURGE/CONF, and DE*LETE :== DELETE/CONF in my setups. This is to avoid accidental deletions and purges.
However, one of my customers while purging files, accidentally typed PURGEE instead of PURGE, and this purged all earlier versions of files in his directory without seeking confirmation.
When he mentioned that to me, I also tried, with PURGEA, PURGEB, etc. All of these ignored my symbol for PU*RGE, and purged files without confirmation.
Has anyone noticed this behavior before, and/or if anyone knows how one could overcome this?

It is precisely to combat 'helpful overlapping command verb definitions' that this original sin in DCL was left in place.
Make "PC" be "Purge/Confirm" and "DL" for "Delete/LOG" but don't mess with my PURGE, EDIT and DELETE.
I want to use DELETE/SYMBOL and EDIT/EDT without stumbling!
So I use EDITx/EDT and so forth, when not 'at home'.
I count on it now, to make sure that when I am a guest user for an account I don't get caught out by 'helpful' admins leading to unpredictable behavior.
Best I know the behavior is undocumented.
Some history in this space...
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/wizard/wiz_6372.html
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/wizard/wiz_3614.html
bad behavior example:
$ delete := delete/log
$ delete *.tmp;*
%DELETE-I-FILDEL, QA.TMP;1 deleted (15 blocks)
%DELETE-I-FILDEL, X.TMP;5 deleted (3 blocks)
:
%DELETE-I-TOTAL, 16 files deleted (51 blocks)
$ delete/symb xxx
%DCL-I-IGNQUAL, qualifiers appearing before this item were ignored
\SYMB\

Related

In Fish, how do you tweak things around to match special key bindings?

Context
So I finally give a try to Fish, and as one would expect I encounter some frictions due to differences with my usual routines.
The most astonishing for me, as for many other, was the absence of the bang operator. I'm fine with the lose of sudo !!, as the suggested function replacement seems even better to me, I named it gar which means "To make, compel (someone to do something); to cause (something to be done." However I'll need a replacement for !<abc><enter> which grab the last history line starting with <abc> and run it without further ado, suggestions are welcome.
Now, for the more personal things:
- I use a Typematrix 2030 keyboard
- I use a bépo layout
- I like to configure default finger position keys with the most used actions
Aims
As on my keybord <enter> is well positioned and is semantically relevant for that, ideally I would like to achieve the following key binding:
ctrl-enter: accept the whole suggestion and run it without further confirmation
ctrl-tab: accept the whole suggestion and wait for further edit
alt-enter: redo the last command without further confirmation
But according to xev it appears that, at least with Gnome-terminal, this combinations are not recognized. Are they terminal that supports it? For now I remapped these three to <ctrl>-i, <alt>-i and <alt>-I respectively:
bind --preset \ci forward-char execute
bind --preset \ei forward-char
bind --preset \eI forward-word
This works as expected, but it seems that now the tab key will also map to the first item. I guess that tab map to <alt>-i at some point in the shell stack. I wasn't aware of that, so I don't know yet if it will be possible for Fish to separate each of them.
To manage jobs, I also came with
bind --preset \es fg
bind --preset \eS bg
The first works as expected, but the second one doesn't. With application like vim, the binding should be operated in the application configuration itself of course. But for things as trivial as yes, <alt>-S won't work as expected while <crl>-z continue to operate normally.
I also would like to bind some commands like ls -alh and git status --short to a directly executed command, showing the result bellow the currently edited line, allowing to further type seamlessly, but didn't find the way to do it yet.
Summary of remaining question
So here are my more precise questions summarised:
how do I bind the sleep signal to <alt>-S?
is there a terminal I can use where <alt>-<enter> and <ctrl>-<enter> works?
how to seamlessly run command while maintaining the current line edition in place?
can you bind something to <alt>-i without altering <tab>?
how do I bind the sleep signal to -S?
What you are doing with bind \es fg is to alter a binding inside the shell.
But when you execute yes, the shell isn't currently in the foreground, so shell bindings don't apply.
What you'd have to do instead is change the terminal settings via stty susp \cs,
but fish resets the terminal settings when executing commands (so you can't accidentally break them and end up in an unusable environment), so there currently is no way to do this in fish.
can you bind something to <alt>-i without altering <tab>?
Sure. You bind \ei. Which is escape+i, which is alt-i (because in a terminal alt is escape).
Your problem is with ctrl-i, which in the way terminals encode control+character is tab. The application receives an actual tab character, and at that point the information has been lost.
is there a terminal I can use where - and - works?
Most terminals should send \e\r for alt-enter. ctrl-enter again is unencodable with the usual code (because \r is ctrl-m), just like ctrl-tab is.
Any fix to this requires the terminal to encode these combination differently.
how to seamlessly run command while maintaining the current line edition in place?
I don't know what you mean by this. I'm guessing you want fish to remain open and editable while a command also runs in the foreground. That can't work. There's no way to synchronize output from two commands to a terminal, not with cursor movement being what it is.

home\ end keys in xterm not behaving correctly

While I'm opening an xterm from my tsh at work, the Home and End keys scroll the xterm screen up and down respectively instead of moving to the beginning\ end of the line.
According to /etc/inputrc, my key binding is:
"\e[1~": beginning-of-line
"\e[4~": end-of-line
...
"\e[H": beginning-of-line
"\e[F": end-of-line
Which is exactly what every site I found on the subject suggested, and yet - with no use.
If it means anything, the Ctrl-a, Ctrl-e behave as they should, but since I'm used for other keying, I'm missing.
Needless to say, since it is a work computer, I don't have writing permissions to the /etc/inputrc file and nobody is willing to change it for me.
How can I bypass this problem?
Don't really care if the solution will be a change in some file or an option to add to the xterm command.
p.s. (thanks to comment)
Before asking, I tried setting the same binding in my ~/.inputrc file, didn't work either
The problem is unrelated to any possible setting in .inputrc (that doesn't scroll your screen up and down, though you could scroll through the command-history, etc).
If it's xterm (and not some other terminal), you can fix this with the translations resource, e.g., by using xev to identify the names for the home/end keys (probably just home and end), and using those names in a translation like this (in your X resources):
*VT100*translations: #override \n\
<key>home: string(0x1b) string("[1~") \n\
<key>end: string(0x1b) string("[4~") \n
Solaris used to do this for the page-up/page-down keys, and (for instance) if you are using an old version such as Solaris 10, the advice in the xterm FAQ Why can't I use the pageup/pagedown keys? is relevant.
Further reading:
.Xresources or .Xdefaults? may be helpful. Most of the comments on X resources assume that you use X only locally, on a desktop. If your use is more general than that, .Xdefaults (usually with the hostname appended) is the place to start. Otherwise, .Xresources is useful.
Sven Maschek's XTerm app-defaults file

Delphi Text Files get NULLS (0's) written to them instead of text

Unfortunately this question may be a bit vague, I have a problem that I am finding difficult to describe, it is intermittent and I cannot reproduce it myself, I am just hoping that someone else has seen something like it before.
My application has quite a lot of text and ini files that get written when it closes down. Typically this would be in response to a Close event, but may also be triggered by a WM_ENDSESSION. Unfortunately at the moment I am not sure if both or only one of these events can result in the problem I am about to describe, because I have been unable to reproduce this problem myself.
The issue I have is that for some users some of the text and ini files end up being written as NULLs. The file sizes end up looking about right, but instead of text, every character is written as a x00. So instead of 500 bytes of regular ASCII text I end up with 500 x00's. I also have an application log file that can sometimes end up with nulls written to it also. However the logging of x00's to the log file does not necessarily correspond to the exact same time as x00's were written to the config files.
For my files I am using TmemIniFile or TstringList which means that ultimately a Tstrings.SaveToFile is being called for all of my config files.
sl:=TstringList.Create;
try
SourceList.GetSpecificSubset(sl);
AppLogLogLine('Commands: Saving Always Available list. List has '+inttostr(sl.Count)+' commands.');
sl.SaveToFile(fn);
finally
sl.Free;
end;
But then I also have instance where I would already have a TstringList in memory and I just call SaveToFile on it. For TmemIniFile the structure would look similar to above. In some instances I may have an outer loop to write multiple lists. Some of those will result in files being written correctly, some will be full of 00's.
EDIT: GetSpecificSubset is simply a function that will populate "sl" with a list of command names. I have "GetAllUsersCommands", "GetHiddenCommands", "GetAlwaysVisibleCommands" etc. Note that my log file also writes this kind of thing, as a check for how big those lists are:
16/10/2013 11:17:49 AM: Commands: Saving Any User list. List has 8 commands.
16/10/2013 11:17:49 AM: Commands: Saving Always Visible list. List has 17 commands.
16/10/2013 11:17:49 AM: Commands: Saving Always Hidden list. List has 2 commands.
I accidentally left the logging line out of the code above. So this log line is the last thing written before calling Tstrings.SaveToFile, and at that point it thinks it has data. Even if somehow each line of text were NULLs, I would still expect to see x13x10 in the files, but that is not happening.
Here's a screen cap from a HEX editor:
EDIT 2: I just realised I left off a very important piece of information. This is only intermittent. It works 99% of the time. When saving files at shutdown it might not even be all files. Even if I have a loop saving multiple similar files, some may work fine and others may fail.

Any way to find more detail about WARNING: ID3D10Buffer::SetPrivateData: Existing private data of same name with different size found!

I'm encountering this error when I'm running my DirectX10 program in debug mode:
D3D10: WARNING: ID3D10Buffer::SetPrivateData: Existing private data of same name with different size found! [ STATE_SETTING WARNING #55: SETPRIVATEDATA_CHANGINGPARAMS ]
I'm trying to make the project highly OOP as a learning exercise, so there's a chance that this may be occurring, but is there a way to get some more details?
It appears this warning is raised by D3DX10CreateSprite, which is internally called by font->DrawText
You can ignore this warning, seems to be a bug in the Ms code :)
Direct3D11 doesn't have built-in text rendering anymore, so you won't encounter it in the future.
Since this is a D3D11 warning, you could always turn it off using ID3D11InfoQueue:
D3D11_MESSAGE_ID hide [] = {
D3D11_MESSAGE_ID_SETPRIVATEDATA_CHANGINGPARAMS,
// Add more message IDs here as needed
};
D3D11_INFO_QUEUE_FILTER filter;
memset(&filter, 0, sizeof(filter));
filter.DenyList.NumIDs = _countof(hide);
filter.DenyList.pIDList = hide;
d3dInfoQueue->AddStorageFilterEntries(&filter);
See this page for more. I found your question while googling for the answer and had to search a bit more to find the above snippet, hopefully this will help someone :)
What other data are you looking for or interested in?
The warning is pretty clear about what is going on, but if you want to hunt down a bit more data, there may be a few things to try.
Try calling ID3D10Buffer::GetPrivateData with the same name or do some other check to see if there is data with that name already, and if so, what the contents are. Print your results to a file, output window, or console. This may be combined with breakpoints to see where the duplicate is occurring (break when there's already data).
You may (not positive) be able to set the D3D runtimes to debug mode and to break on warnings (not sure if it can do warnings or just errors). Debug your app in VS or your preferred debugger, and when the warning is shown, it will break and you can look at the parameters.
Go through your code and track down all calls to ID3D10Buffer::SetPrivateData and look to see if there are any obvious duplicates. If there are, work up the program flow and see why and what you can do about them (this may work best after you use one of the former methods to know where to start).
How are your data names set up, and what is the buffer used for? Examining one or both may lead you to a conflict somewhere.
You may also try unicorns, they've been known to help with this kind of problem.

Examples of getting it wrong first, on purpose

I just caught myself doing something I do a lot, and wanted to generalize it, express it, share it and see who else is following this general practice, to find some other example situations where it might be relevant.
The general practice is getting something wrong first, on purpose, to establish that everything else is right before undertaking the current task.
What I was trying to do, specifically, was to find examples in our code base where the dojo TextArea widget was used. I knew (because I had it in front of me - existence proof) that the TextBox widget was present in at least one file. So I looked first for what I knew was there:
grep -r digit.form.TextBox | grep -v
svn
This wasn't right - I had made a common (for me) mistake of leaving off the star, so I fixed that:
grep -r digit.form.TextBox * | grep
-v svn
which found no results! Quick comparison with the file I was looking at showed me I had misspelled "dijit":
grep -r dijit.form.TextBox * | grep
-v svn
And now I got results. Cool; doing it wrong first on purpose meant my query was correct except for looking for the wrong thing, so now I could construct the right query:
grep -r dijit.form.TextArea * | grep
-v svn
and be confident that when it gave me no results, it was because there are no such files, and not because I had malformed the query.
I'll add three other examples as answers; please add any others you're aware of.
TDD
The red-green-refactor cycle of test-driven development may be the archetype of this practice. With red, demonstrate that the functionality doesn't exist; then make it exist and demonstrate that you've done so by witnessing the green bar.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/275085
This VBA routine turns off the "subdatasheets" property for every table in your MS Access database. The user is instructed to make sure error-handling is set to "Break only on unhandled errors." The routine identifies tables needing the fix by the error that is thrown. I'm not sure this precisely fits your question, but it's always interesting to me that the error is being used in a non-error way.
Here's an example from VBA:
I also use camel case when I Dim my variables. ThisIsAnExampleOfCamelCase. As soon as I exit the VBA code line if Access doesn't change the lower case variable to camel case then I know I've got a typo. [OR, Option Explicit isn't set, which is the post topic.]
I also use this trick, several times an hour at least.
arrange - assert - act - assert
I sometimes like, in my tests, to add a counter-assertion before the action to show that the action is actually responsible for producing the desired outcome demonstrated by the concluding assertion.
When in doubt of my spelling, and of my editor's spell-checking
We use many editors. Many of them highlight misspelled words as I type them - some do not. I rely on automatic spell checking, but I can't always remember whether the editor of the moment has that feature. So I'll enter, say, "circuitx" and hit space. If it highlights, I'll back up over the space and the "x" and type another space - and learn that I spelled circuit correctly - but if it doesn't, I'll copy the word and paste it into a known spell-checker to see whether I did.
I'm not sure it's the best way to act, as it does not prevent you from mispelling the final command, for example typing "TestArea" or something like that instead of "TextArea" (your finger just have to slip a little for such a mistake).
IMHO the best way is to run your "final" command, but on two sample files first : one containing the requested text, another that doesn't.
In other words, instead of running a "similar" command, run the real one, but over "similar" data.
(Not sure if this would be a good idea to try for real!)
For example, you might give the system to the users for testing and tell them the password to get started is "Apple".
You know the users are fully up and ready to test (everything is installed and connections to databases working) when they contact you and say the password doesn't work (it's actually "Orange").

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