At 01:02 PM 7/9/97 CDT, Tim Stoodt wrote:
>      I'm a worried MPE/iX (5.0) rookie, who wants to do a couple of
>simple things (awk,grep,vi) in the Posix shell.  I've read some of
>the archived stuff, so I know how to get into the shell, use the man
>pages, and how to get out.  What I am very concerned about, is
>getting hung up in the shell with vi, or maybe a script that is in
>a loop.  What should I do in that case to stop the shell, or my MPE
>session?

It all depends on the nature of the problem.  Many looping processes may be
breakable by ctrl-Y or break, or closing the window of a network session.
Not to feed your paranoia, but much worse scenarios are possible.  Not too
long ago I caused a full SYSTEM ABORT by running an awk script from the CI
which did some callci's and output redirections within the script.  That
incident is being investigated as SR#5003365387.  Things like that are hard
to predict, harder to avoid, and basically impossible to recover from
gracefully.

Don't know if that helps any, but the upshot is this:  The posix shell &
utilities offer some very nice functionality, but tread lightly and don't be
too surprised if you occasionally get very undesirable results.

________________________________________________________
Jon Diercks * Systems Manager         Computing Services
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http://rowlf.csv.anderson.edu/        1100 East Fifth St
(317)641-4305 * FAX (317)641-3851     Anderson, IN 46012