vmsish

Controls VMS-specific language features. Currently, there are four VMS-specific features available: status ($?), exit, time, and hushed. If you're not using VMS, then this module won't have any affect.

vmsish is shipped with the Perl 5.8 source kit.

For example, without vmsish, you can't execute a hushed version of exit:

$ perl -e"exit 44;" Non-hushed error exit %SYSTEM-F-ABORT, abort DCL message $ show sym $STATUS $STATUS == "%X0000002C"

When you use vmsish, you get . . . nothing!

$ perl -e"use vmsish qw(hushed); exit 44;"

vmsish implements the following options.

• status
• Causes $? and system to return the native VMS exit status instead of emulating the POSIX exit status.
• exit
• Causes exit 1 to produce a successful exit (with status SS$_NORMAL) instead of emulating Unix exit(), which considers exit 1 as an indication of an error. As with the CRTL's exit() function, exit 0 is also mapped to an exit status of SS$_NORMAL, and any other argument to exit() is used directly as Perl's exit status.
• time
• Makes all times relative to the local time zone instead of the default Universal Time (a.k.a. Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT).
• hushed
• Suppresses printing of VMS status messages to SYS$OUTPUT and SYS$ERROR if Perl terminates with an error status and allows programs that are expecting Unix-style Perl to avoid parsing VMS error messages. It does not supress any messages from Perl itself, just the messages generated by DCL after Perl exits. The DCL symbol $STATUS will still have the termination status, but with a high-order bit set.