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Taking advantage of the VECSL

By Shawn M. Gordon

As though I didn’t have enough to do. I ran into VESOFT’s founder Vladimir Volokh at HP World, and we were talking about VESOFT (what else?) when he suggested it would be a neat idea to have a column that talked about tips and techniques for the various VESOFT products. There are thousands of sites around the world using VESOFT’s software, especially MPEX. I’ve been a heavy user of their products for 13 years, and even worked for VESOFT for a short while about eight years ago.

I am initially looking at doing this every other month. I’m going to try to focus on some of the more esoteric functions or features of the various products, and show you how they might be useful. I don’t want to get into huge command file examples, but I will show small ones that illustrate technique. As always, I am totally open to getting input from you users of MPEX, Security/3000 or VEAudit/3000 — it helps me learn, too. Send me your tricks, and we’ll get a “3000 for 2000” cap out to you as our thanks.

For this inaugural issue I want to talk about the VECSL, the Contributed Software Library for VESOFT. These are user-contributed command files as well as command files that were developed by VESOFT employees. It also includes all the articles written by VESOFT employees (mostly Eugene) over the years. Here is the account structure:

ACCOUNT FILESPACE-SECTORS
/GROUP COUNT LIMIT
VECSL 11312 **
/CMD 528 **
/DOC 32 **
/EBOOK 9952 **
/JOB 224 **
/LISTF 224 **
/MENU 64 **
/MPEX 64 **
/PUB 80 **
/SECURITY 64 **
/VEAUDIT 80 **

The CMD group has some cute MPEX command files, while the DBGRAPH one is especially fun. It just has one quirk — you only need to specify the root file to get the graph, don’t use a wild card. Some of these are “expression” programs, which is Eugene’s Pascal derivative used to implement functions in MPEX (more on that in another column). Others are standard command files. I would suggest you just do a print of all of them and read the comments to see if you might have a need for them (this is true for all the groups).

DOC only contains a manual for PSCREEN, so I’m not sure why it’s in there. EBOOK is a lot of fun; these are the articles I was talking about. It’s also got a copy of Eugene’s magnum opus on language comparisons from about 10 years ago. This thing clocks in at over 10,000 lines, but is a fascinating read. There is also a good one that’s pretty current from Paul Taffel on Posix that I always find helpful. These EBOOK files are pretty interesting, but the only real problem is how old most of them are now. This stuff was gold when it first came out, but some of it isn’t worth a lot anymore. You should browse through them all, though — you will no doubt learn something.

JOB has some nice examples of STREAMX processing. I would personally like to see some more examples here (I guess I should submit some and stop complaining). The LISTF group, of course, has custom LISTF format templates. I have two favorites here, the N33 and the Qedit. The N33 shows all the data time data for files. It’s a variation on the mode 3 listf. The Qedit one I wrote when I worked at VESOFT, and is designed to read out the file label of a Qedit file and tell you the actual information, so it looks something like this:

FILENAME
---LOGICAL RECORD---   -------BLOCKS-------   ----SPACE----

SIZE   TYPE   LINES    USED    MAX   %FULL   SECTORS #X MX

XYZ
74B   COBX   32224    2393   9109   26.3%      4800        1
*

The only downside to this is it has to FOPEN the file, and in so doing it will update the access date and time of the file.

MENU really needs an infusion of new life. There are several interesting examples of sophisticated technique; again I should probably submit something. The MPEX group has some real gems in it, especially illustrating date formatting and math — definitely worth a look.

The SECURITY group has two excellent examples of things to put in your SECURCON file. I wish I could remember all the cutesy things I did years ago so I could submit it, but this is a good place to start to get the juices flowing.

The VEAUDIT group has some excellent VEAUDIT examples. I’ve got a couple I’m getting ready to send in myself. A lot of people still don’t realize that VEAUDIT can manipulate accounting structure as well as report the security flaws. I’m going to write extensively on this in future columns. Check these out and see what you think.

My purpose in pointing out the VECSL is two-fold. One is to get you to use it, and the second is to get you to contribute to it. It’s automatically installed with every copy of MPEX, SECURITY and VEAUDIT, so take advantage of it.

Shawn Gordon, whose S.M. Gordon & Associates firm supplies HP 3000 utilities, has worked with 3000s since 1983.