Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!RITA.ACS.WASHINGTON.EDU!WIZARD
From: WIZARD@RITA.ACS.WASHINGTON.EDU ("The Bandit . . . ", on RITA)
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: old prompt question which I never saw answered.
Message-ID: <8806280841.AA18214@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 7 Jun 88 19:30:00 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 26

Some time back, someone asked the following question:

>  Hi world,
>  I have a program that spawns a process to execute DCL commands. I have
>  arranged to have this process (running DCL) read input from a mailbox
>  and output to another mailbox. Then I use read qio's on the second mailbox
>  and send whatever the qio's return to my screen and to a log file. What
>  I am trying to get is the prompt. Where does it go? Reading from the second
>  mailbox only shows DCL output. No prompt!

Now, I have no idea who it was that asked this question, but I do have a brief
answer.  The problem is that VMS tries to be "smart" about issuing prompts.
If your input and output device specifications are NOT identical, the prompt
is simply NOT issued.  For you normal interactive session, SYS$INPUT has the
same translation as SYS$OUTPUT, and so prompts are issued.  For your normal
batch job, SYS$INPUT <> SYS$OUTPUT, and your batch log file does NOT contain
the prompts.   There is no reasonable work-around that I know of at this time.

Derek Haining
Academic Computing Services
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington
(206) 543-5852

DEREK@RITA.ACS.WASHINGTON.EDU
        -or-
DEREK@UWARITA.BITNET