Hi Tony,

(Monday September 21 1998 10:37) Tony Pater to Ted Menks about: Variable ?

 TP>> I haven't left you..... just been busy.
 TM>> So was I. That's why this reply comes in a bit late. Sorry for that!
 TP>  Nice to see you back Ted ....

It's also good to BE back Tony. I've missed the lot of you... :-)

 TP> I'm trying to bone up on Rexx
 TP>  for this sorta stuff..... but 4dos seems so much easier/intuative.

Yeah, seems Rex thinks of nearly everything we can wish for :-)

 TM>> if exist l:\xyz\messages\%Gyear%\%Gmonth%\nul
 TP>  Hhhhhm Ok ..... the '%' on the end didn't appear necessary, but it's
 TP>  an easy matter to insert it.

There have been situations in which I couldn't get things to work without
the %, but you may be right about them being not necessary here. (As may be
everybody else, who cared to correct me. Thnx to all!)

 TP>  As to the 'nul', I'm not clear why it would be necessary... as the
 TP>  'if exist' does the check ...
 TP>  Can you explain the virtues of using 'nul'  ???

As far as I remember, "if exist" does NOT do the trick without
the "nul" appended to the path. A dir, after all, is NOT a file.
And since "if exist" looks for files, it will fail in most cases.
Maybe this has changed with newest versions of OS-es. Anyway, adding
"nul" makes sure it ALWAYS works.
If you don't want to use "nul", you shouldn't use "if
exist" either, but take "if isdir" instead.

Good to know that it works, whatever it looks like now. :-)

CU,
    2:2449/236.51  PGPkey: 2048/1B2ACCED (by RRQ)
... If at first you don't succeed, have somebody else do it for you
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