Mike Ruskai wrote the following to All on 07-20-1994 regarding More
REXX...:

MR> I would like to redirect the output of the SAY command to a text
MR> file which  is referred to, but I do not know how to redirect the
MR> SAY command.  The  online REXX Information only says that the
MR> "standard" rules for redirection  apply to the SAY command.  Well,
MR> standard rules as far as I know include  using > and >>,
which translate into a bad arithmetic attempt and the 
MR> characters >> being printed when SAY encounters them.  So, how do
MR> I  redirect the output of SAY to a file?  Or anything other than
MR> STDOUT.

You are misusing the term "redirection".  What you really want to do
is simply *write* to a specific file.  Use Lineout for that, i.e.
instead of
  say "The following icons must be renamed."
use the command 
  call lineout 'checking.txt', "The following icons must be renamed"
if you want to write to the file 'checking.txt'.

The statement that "standard" rules for redirection apply to the SAY
command means that if a Rexx program is executed with redirection, as
when you type the command
  myrexx.cmd > output.txt
on the command line, then any Say commands within myrexx.cmd will be
redirected to the file output.txt.  You can redirect OS/2 commands
inside the REXX program (as you did with the dir command), but you can
only redirect Rexx commands like Say from outside, e.g. on the command
line.

MR> Beyond that, is there a way to check an individual filename for
MR> the  presence of a bad character so that it could be checked upon
MR> the conversion  of each icon file?  Doing a directory listing of a
MR> couple thousand icons  even on my 486DX2/66 isn't a fun wait.  I
MR> would like to have it check each  icon just before processing, and
MR> if it contains a bad character (actually  only the & since it is the
MR> only bad character unique to OS/2, not DOS) move  it to a directory
MR> and notify the user that there are icons there that need  to be
MR> renamed. 

If you have an icon name in the variable "iconname", just use
something like
  If Pos( "&", iconname) > 0 Then /* name contains
"&" character */
If you want to check for any one of a list of bad characters,
investigate the Verify function.  You might want to look at SysFileTree
as a means of getting a list of names.  

If you are really interested in the names that appear beneath desktop
icons, then you have to get the "long name", which is stored in the
Extended Attributes.
  rc = SysGetEA( filename, ".LONGNAME", "LNAME")
will put the file's long name in variable "lname".  If rc is nonzero,
it failed. 
                                                                          
--- Russ Williams ---
___ Green Valley, AZ ---

---
 X KWQ/2 1.2e X Funny, only sensible people agree with me.

--- Maximus/2 2.01wb