VSI OpenVMS Forum

I'm really rusty at DCL, I've only written some very basic ones. Are there any repositories of DCL programs people have written to learn from? If not that's alright.

You will find some limited examles in SYS$HELP, all over the system disk

Also Google is your friend - there is much on the Interweb. I lean't most about DCL prior to getting access to any of the documentation, using the help facility. The DCL Dictionary (see VSI web site - documentation) is good.

You might also look under the Community==>Freeware link and well as OpenSourceRepositories link. There are some utilities there written in DCL.

One of the best ways would be to get a hold of "Writing Real Programs in DCL" by Hoffman (Hoff) and Anagnostopoulos. But a quick Google search shows the price of that book has skyrocketed. At least the 2nd edition has. It's out of print and I don't see any online archives of it. But if you can find one for a reasonable price, get it.

Actually, I see a few on Ebay for not horrible prices, though most are the 1st edition. It's not bad but the 2nd has been updated to a more modern version of VMS. Green (ish) cover is the 1st and the red(ish) toned cover is the 2nd.

What is a pity is that the code in the book is not available online. The book was published before that became common.

The Elsevier OpenVMS book series has some good ones. They used to have online code repositories but I can't find them now. I do see most of the books are now PDF which means you could cut and paste the code.

https://shop.elsevier.com/search?query= ... ubDateDesc

Neil Rieck's pages have programming examples - some in DCL
http://neilrieck.net/demo_vms_html/open ... index.html

The Wayback's copy of dcl.openvms.org (RIP).
https://web.archive.org/web/20040828080 ... envms.org/

Robert Gezelter's web site has some DCL examples, plus a lot of other good information
http://www.rlgsc.com/blog/openvms-consu ... ltant.html

DCL is a nice command language but not a good programming language.

Use DCL for interactive usage and for simple scripts that automate a sequence of commands.

$ HELP

is probably sufficient to learn that, But there are also a few relevant manuals:

https://docs.vmssoftware.com/vsi-openvm ... onary-a-m/ and https://docs.vmssoftware.com/vsi-openvm ... onary-n-z/ document all DCL commands.

But https://docs.vmssoftware.com/vsi-openvms-user-s-manual/ and https://docs.vmssoftware.com/guide-to-o ... lications/ may also be very relevant.

If you want to go to programming scripting, then at some level of complexity you are better off switching from DCL to Perl / Python / Groovy / whatever.

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For programming examples I do have a few like:

https://www.vajhoej.dk/arne/info-vax/ut ... utilities/

https://www.vajhoej.dk/arne/info-vax/cgi/mgmt/

If you are going to program in DCL, spend time getting to grips with the lexical functions. They're not used much as an interactive command language, but if you look at the command procedures in SYS$HELP and SYS$MANAGER you'll see that they are used heavily. The same applies to subroutines.

there was once a big collection of DCL at a website dcl.openvms.org which is sadly no more but can be found in the internet archive.

See https://web.archive.org/web/20061006041 ... rchive.php

Hello

I used web archive and put a good number of them on

https://foss.vmsgenerations.org/gl/dcl-openvms-org

I do not remember if you need to create an account to access them.

gl wrote: ↑

Sun Apr 21, 2024 4:57 pm

Hello

I used web archive and put a good number of them on

https://foss.vmsgenerations.org/gl/dcl-openvms-org

I do not remember if you need to create an account to access them.

Thanks! and apparently you need an account.

gitlab wrote:You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.

115 procedures I count

Added in 2 hours 50 minutes 51 seconds:
I have modified the protection, you no longer need an account