At a previous job we used the Korn Shell in the MKS Toolkit (www.mks.com) to get a decent scripting language for DOS/Windows + Unix compatibility for exactly these sorts of problems.

Nowadays of course I'd probably use Perl (which comes with the MKS toolkit too now, or Microsoft supply a suitable version on the NT 4 Workstation Resource Kit) - as it's more powerful, and to avoid Korn shell differences between Unixes.

Amusingly, the 32-bit command shell in NT 4 (cmd.exe) has lots of enhancements to the batch commands (eg more gets more Unix-like, pushd and popd commands, subroutines in batch files, lots of changes to the "if" tests, and the "for" command can now recurse directories, or even open a file and perform an operation for each line - it's not AWK but it's a start).

Of course, they're all hacked on, poorly documented (try "if /?" for a list of new changes) and still woefully inadequate, but they're slightly better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Tim Meadowcroft // IT Development // West Merchant Bank

______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: Jam with TCL Author: "Jose Vasconcellos" <jos...@utstar.com> at Internet Date: 17/11/97 11:43

After a lot of frustration trying to get Jam to work properly under Windows 95, I decided to take a different approach. I created a new exectcl.c file that uses TCL to interpret the actions. It works great under Windows 95. I now have a rich scripting language to use.

The problem is that under Windows 95 the standard shell (COMMAND.COM) is quite limited; it has problems passing up result code. There are several solutions around but they didn't address the fundamental issue: COMMAND.COM has a poor scripting language.

With TCL (version 8.0p1) it is easy and quite portable (I don't know about VMS).

Enjoy,

Jose Vasconcellos