James B. Byrne writes:
> 1.      The vi editor as shipped does not support cursor control.  Now I
> might considered a little odd for thinking this, but why would anyone
> ship a visual orientated, page mode editor and NOT have any built in
> cursor control?

Look upon this as an opportunity to learn the vi cursor movement keystrokes.
That way, you'll be functional in vi whether it's on MPE, Solaris, HPUX,
FreeBSD, etc.  ;-)

This annoyed me at first until I learned the keystrokes.  But it's really a
much simpler way of dealing with multiple vi platforms.

> 3.      Qedit works from inside the shell and on HFS files. Yeahhhh!  The
> only thing lacking is support for the UNIX ! construct to execute a
> shell command similar to the : prefix used to execute a MPEiX command
> from inside the editor.  If it has something similar that I just
> don't know about I would appreciate a pointer or two in the right
> direction.

How about:

        :sh.hpbin.sys '-c "posix command goes here"'

You'd probably want to make that a command file or UDC, since the quoting
must be EXACTLY as shown.

> 6.      The default mode mask for MPEiX files seems to be:
>
> rwx-------
>
> Which means that new files have to be individually chmod'ed in order
> to serve them.  I want to set a net default mask in the .profile so
> that the mask becomes:
>
> rwx---r---

Just add/modify the umask line in /etc/profile or each individual .profile.

> 7.      I take it that the sticky bit is not supported under POSiX.  Is
> this correct?

Correct, as far as I know.  I've never had to test this though.

> 8.      I have been warned that MPE files served by the Apache httpd
> should be variable length.  Is this correct.  I haven't changed
> anything and our financial reports seem to come out just fine.  The
> presence of the cctl byte does not affect the of the documents.

Probably bytestream is the best format to use with Apache, but MPE variable
should also work well.

MPE fixed has problems because Apache can't guess at the bytestream-emulated
length of the file.  But this is a bytestream emulator feature, not an Apache
bug.

> 9.      Lastly, does anyone know of a browser that supports printed web
> documents by selection and or page rather than dumping the whole
> thing?  I would rather not have to write a java page sever just to
> get this functionality since it will be used so infrequently, and I
> am notoriously lazy.

Actuate (www.actuate.com) is a full-blown report writing package that has
this type of functionality, but the Actuate report server won't run on MPE.
Though if you run it on NT you should in theory be able to use ODBC to get
at MPE data.  I will be attempting this sometime in 1998.
--
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
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"You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish." - tunefs(1M)