I don't recall any restriction on the size of DCL script arguments, but it will documented be in the DCL manual.
At 11:50 AM 7/10/2003, you wrote:
> At the moment it seems that Ant's basic requirements to make <exec> > work could be covered by Java and maybe an ANTRUN.COM DCL script along > the lines of antRun and antrun.bat. >
If I'm not mistaken then a DCL script can only process a maximum of 8 arguments and the call to a DCL script from Java, including the script filename and its arguments, can at the most be 256 characters long.
In the case of a the ANTRUN.COM DCL script, which will be used by Ant to run arbitrary commands through the DCL shell, this could be a problem. The first argument is the working directory to use, the second is the command to run. This only leaves 6 slots left to use as arguments for the command. Further the path to ANTRUN.COM, the path to the working directory, and the command string all together will probably occupy quite many of the 256 characters available.
Either this is a limitation users on VMS have to live with or a different approach is required. For instance it would be possible to create a temporary DCL script which has all the information in it to set the working directory and run the command. This has two advantages: First the limit on the number of arguments to the command to execute is not artificially lowered and second invoking a command from inside a DCL script allows a command length of 1024 characters. The big disadvantage being that a temporary file has to be created and deleted again. And VMS is not exactly known for having a high performant file system.
Any thoughts? (I'm not sure that I got all the facts correct here, so maybe someone will be able to correct me.)
-- knut
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