John Boucher wrote:
!F$PARSE will leave the <> intact. !And if you're specifically subtracting "]" then you're not subtracting a ">" ! !So I'd like to revise my previous command to: ! $(NOECHO) WRITE TMP "read " , "$(PERL_ARCHLIB)"-"]"-">" , ".auto" , !"$(FULLEXT)"-"["-"<" , ".packlist" !But this still won't work if one value uses "<>" and the other uses "[]". I think that scenario is unlikely. RMS allowance of "<",">" in place of "[","]" was done primarily to accomodate non North American keyboards that did not necessarily have keys for the "]" and "[" characters. Hence I would guess that anyone who use ">" as a delimiter would use it all over the place. !I'll look into SYS$PARSE, but that would mean writing an executable, which !violates "using only *very* commonly available VMS tools." No - please do not bother. F$parse() is enough of a wrapper around sys$parse that if it cannot provide an extra layer of de-obfuscation then there may be no point in taking matters any further. Peter Prymmer
