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The i offers a variety of CL commands to help us control and subdue the i. But some of them are more familiar than others. Let's look at one particular family of commands.

david shireyWritten by David Shirey

Sometimes, on a cold winter evening, as I sit quietly in my den dressed in my favorite smoking jacket and puff contentedly on one of my favorite pipes while a fire crackles on the hearth, I like to take an obscure CL command and just investigate the living daylights out of it. Unfortunately, I also do it during the blazing hot summer when I have had a few too many Sunset Susan cocktails. And that is the case this time.

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Let's look at the rest of the new built-ins for CL.

bruce viningWritten by Bruce Vining

Last month, in "More Tools for the CL Developer," we looked at the new 7.2 built-ins %char, %dec, %int, and %uint. This month, we'll go over the additional built-ins of %upper, %lower, %size, and %len. But before doing that, I need to make a correction to last month's column.

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IBM i offers some new CL built-ins in 7.2.

 

bruce viningWritten by Bruce Vining

 

You may or may not have noticed that with the 7.2 release of the i operating system IBM has continued to enhance CL in order to make our lives, as developers, easier. With 7.2, we have eight new CL built-ins available to us.

 

 

This month, we'll look at four of the new CL built-ins: %char, %dec, %int, and %uint. In the next article, we'll review the other four: %upper, %lower, %size, and %len.

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Investigate the ILE CL compiler's mechanism for receiving program parameters.

junlei liWritten by Junlei Li

 

There's no doubt that the program-call mechanism in IBM i is fully dynamic. The called program can be determined at run time instead of at compile time. The parameter list passed to the called program can be composed at run time by the calling program. Also, the length of the parameter list for a called program can be changed dynamically. As you might know, an ILE RPG program can retrieve of the length of the parameter list via the RPG %PARMS built-in function (BIF). An ILE C program can also achieve this goal via the first argument of its main function, int argc. So is it possible for an ILE CL program to know the number of parameters passed to it? This article will lead you to answer, all the way down to the RISC instruction level.

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Let's look at the new %CHECK, %CHECKR, and %SCAN built-ins of CL.

bruce viningWritten by Bruce Vining

In last month's article, "How Would You Like That Character String Trimmed?," we reviewed the new CL built-ins %TRIM, %TRIML, and %TRIMR. This month, we'll look at three more CL built-ins that IBM has provided by way of 7.1 PTF SI49061. The new built-ins, which are supported with both the OPM and ILE compilers, are %CHECK, %CHECKR, and %SCAN.

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Switch to and back from different user profiles within the same job with ease.

junlei liWritten by Junlei Li

In UNIX or Linux, users switch to the super user (aka root) or another user via the su shell command (in a new shell, actually). With proper options, a su command can even preserve the original environment in the newly started shell sessionfor example, the -m option (do not reset environment variables) of the su command of GNU Linux. For an IBM i developer or operator, a CL command with function similar to the UNIX/Linux su shell command would be very handy.

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Let's look at the new %TRIM, %TRIML, and %TRIMR built-ins of CL.

bruce viningWritten by Bruce Vining

Over the past year, IBM has continued to enhance CL in order to make our lives, as developers, easier. In the previous article, "New Support for CL Commands Lets You Know When a Command Ends," we saw how a PTF enables the system to call a program of your choosing when a given CL command completes processing. Likewise, in an earlier series of articles, starting with "Introducing the New Run SQL Command," we saw how, with a PTF, you can now run SQL statements directly out of your CL programs.

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Since the System/38, we've had to deal with the implied 32-byte length of character parameters on the command line; this article provides the workarounds.

joe plutaWritten by Joe Pluta

It doesn't matter where I'm working, how skilled the staff is, whether it's new development or mature legacy systems, it never fails that every couple of years I come across the old (and I do mean old) 32-character limitations on character parameters passed from the command line. It's a simple issue, really, but one that still manages to confound us. It may be the greatest example in our community of how those who cannot learn from history (or steal from those who have!) are doomed to repeat it.

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