Ted Ashton writes:
>   Not sure how much help there is out there for me, but I figure it's worth
> a try.  I'm wanting to read Scantron sheets and parse the results with perl.
> Most all of it works fine, except that the scantron machine spits out 310
> characters at blinding speed with no regard for anyone else's feelings.  In MPE
> typically, this is no problem.  Not so under the shell (and perl).  There seems
> To be no way to do the equivalent of (for FILE SCANTRON=$STDINX;REC=-132):

...much FCONTROL()/FSETMODE() code deleted...

> Especially the FControl 41.  Any Advice?

Since the POSIX GTI (General Terminal Interface) was never completed, you won't
be able to do this stuff from a 100% POSIX program.

I see two ways of doing it if you still want to use Perl:

1) Keep the raw I/O work in a Pascal NMPRG (judging from your source example).
The Pascal program reads each record, then writes it to stdout with a trailing
LF.  On the Perl side, invoke the Pascal program via a pipe:

        open(SCANTRON, "PASCPROG |");
        while (<SCANTRON>) {
                perform advanced formatting and processing
        }

Note that you will need the newly GR-ed patch MPEJXM3A or the Pascal program
will abort when (re-)opening the pipe.  (This patch does not fix input pipes
or socket descriptors; I have opened an HPRC call).

2) If you have your heart set on 100% Perl, write a small XS that implements
FCONTROL(), FDEVICECONTROL(), and FSETMODE() functions that will accept a Perl
filehandle and then call the MPE intrinsics.  A must-have intrinsic XS is on
my Perl wish list, but since I'm detouring into the wonderful world of HPUX OS
updates, I just don't have the time to do it myself.
--
Mark Bixby                      E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Coast Community College Dist.   Web: http://www.cccd.edu/~markb/
District Information Services   1370 Adams Ave, Costa Mesa, CA, USA 92626-5429
Technical Support               +1 714 438-4647
"You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish." - tunefs(1M)