by Alec Muffett
Remember: Unix is obscure and opaque, with many short and hard-to-remember command names, unlike VMS
Orderly Shutdown
The SHUTDOWN.COM procedure shuts down the operating system while performing maintenance functions such as disabling future logins, stopping the batch and printer queues, dismounting volumes, and stopping user processes. To use the SHUTDOWN.COM command procedure, log in to the SYSTEM account, enter the following command:
$ @SYS$SYSTEM:SHUTDOWN
Emergency Shutdown with OPCCRASH.EXE
If you cannot perform an orderly shutdown with the SHUTDOWN.COM procedure, run the OPCCRASH.EXE emergency shutdown program. To run the OPCCRASH.EXE program, log in to the SYSTEM account and enter the following command:
$ RUN SYS$SYSTEM:OPCCRASH
I used to say – with tongue in cheek – that from a user perspective, VMS only had 4 intrinsic commands: set, show, help and logout. Three of these had about a gazillion options each.
There are several things about VMS that Unix has only caught up with, in the last few years: Sun Cluster only really hit parity with VAX Cluster with version 4 (when it comes to migrating and restarting jobs from the dead node), and I seem to be rare in *liking* the automatic file versioning in the VMS filesystem (and yes, I know about the purge command to get rid of old copies), which it can be argued has now been caught up with, by ZFS snapshots.
Also, having cut my Unix editing teeth on ex and had reason to swear at vi, eve (aka tpu) on VMS was a real breath of fresh air. I didn’t get to play with emacs until post-Uni, as the site policy seemed to be not to install it (although for the main box we had access to, which has 10 386s shared among several hundred undergrads, emacs may well have been a Really Bad Idea)…
> VMS only had 4 intrinsic commands: set, show, help and logout
Not far different to a REST interface, then.
I remember very little from my VMS days, but I do remember that generally only the first characters of a command where required (enough to make it unique I assume) so as a teenage support monkey, it used to amuse me no end that to run ANALYZE in diagnostic mode, you’d ask users to type ANAL/PROBE
… I never did grow up.
“@SYS$SYSTEM:SHUTDOWN” is still less opaque at first sight than “init 5″…
but more opaque than “shutdown now” 🙂
that’s the BSD influence.
VMS programming was rather “fun”, in a masochistic way.
There were many system library calls. However, the “worst” was SYS$QIO, which was the general purpose I/O call.
This one call had two manuals just for itself. It had up to 15 parameters which varied completely depending upon earlier parameters in the list. Yet for all this complexity you couldn’t get it to set the terminal in to no-echo, with unbuffered key presses sent through to the application without hitting the return key. I spent a week trying.
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