The perldoc command looks weird on VMS, and I do not know the origin of
that convention.
VMS does not support shebangs.
Passing parameters on the command line to a program require that either
the DCL shell command tables be modified to know about that command, or
a foreign command to be created, or a DCL script be used.
Now with perldoc.com and friends, a hack was done so that the resulting
files are both a legal DCL command script and a legal Perl script.
That is very useful It means that all we should have to do is set a
foreign command to the perldoc.com and all should be well.
But for some strange reason it is not, in this case, and I do not know why.
When you run a script on VMS, you prefix it with a "@" sign, and if you
do not specify the ".xxx" extension, VMS adds a ".com" to the file.
But you do not need an an extension.
So to run perldoc.com on VMS you just do:
@perl_root:[utils]perldoc.com "-t"
If you do not quote the "-t" it gets uppercased by the DCL shell.
But if you do the above, it fails because it sees it's argv[0] was
"perldoc.com" and not "perldoc." and refuses to work. Now that could
not be too hard to fix.
It should also work to create a new file name perldoc. The period is
significant here in a new directory and then include the perldoc.com
contents, and then copy the resulting file into the utils directory.
[Oddity in VMS, you can not rename or copy perldoc.com to perldoc., VMS
assumes that you want to keep the .com extension and will preserve it :-(]
Then you could run it with the command below and it should just work.
Note that the period is significant.
@perl_root:[utils]perldoc. "-t"
And then the foreign command would just be:
perldoc :== "@perlroot:[utils]perldoc. "-t".
So in theory there should not be a need to have the existing more
complex foreign commands that are being set up.
After all, if you are going to always use Perl to invoke it, why add the
hack to make it work as a command file?
And even more curious, why add a hack to make look like it should work
as a command file with out actually making it work?
Regards,
-John
