Some senseless babbling from Daniel Doran to Mike Ruskai
on 07-23-94  21:22 about More Rexx......

 DD> MIKE RUSKAI had something deep to write about More REXX...
 
 MR> This also involves my little icon conversion script.
 MR> 
 MR> One thing that is sure to make it puke is for one of the icons to
 MR> have an  invalid filename character in it, namely the '&' character.

 DD> One way around this is to put the filename in quotes.
 DD> 'TYPE THIS&THAT'    doesn't work, but
 DD> 'TYPE "THIS&THAT"' does.
 DD> 'cvtico' current_icon 'temp.ico'  doesn't work, but
 DD> 'cvtico "'current_icon'" temp.ico' should.
 
Thanks for the idea, but I had to play around with it, and it turns out 
that you need this for the quoting scheme: '"'current_icon'"'

 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.
 DD> You cannot redirect a single say command, only the output of all say
 DD> commands in an entire script, as:  rexxthing.cmd>afile

 DD> You can use LINEOUT instead, where FILE contains the filename: 
 DD> CALL LINEOUT FILE "The following icons must be renamed."
 DD> x=lineout(FILE, badname.bad)
 DD> note that case in the keywords is not important, and that there are
 DD> two ways to use a function.  If file='BADFILES', the output will be
 DD> placed in the BADFILES file.
 
OK, thanks.  Of course, I no longer need that option :)

 MR> Beyond that, is there a way to check an individual filename for
 MR> the  presence of a bad character

 DD> tail=""
 DD> parse value filename.n with head '&' tail
 DD> if tail \= "" then do; /* whatever you do with a bad filename */
 DD> /*head will contain everything left of &, tail, everything to the
 DD> right*/ or
 DD> if pos('&',filename.n)>0 then do; /* whatever */

I will keep this in mind for the future, thanks.

 DD> Also, instead of using REN to _move_ files from one directory to
 DD> another, use OS/2's MOVE: MOVE C:\here\*  \there
 DD> This will not work across drives.  Here and there must be on the
 DD> same drive.

Not what I am doing, but I got a fix for that problem using FileSpec.

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