The HDSTOOLS programs for displaying objects require an output device to be specified. The value of the device parameter may be set to one of the following values:
| TERMINAL | The user terminal. |
| PRINTER | The printer. Output is written to a temporary file, |
| NEWFILE[=fnm] | Write to a new file whose name is specified by the environment
variable NEWFILE (default fnm else |
| OLDFILE[=fnm] | Append to the file whose name is specified by the environment
variable OLDFILE (default fnm else |
| other | Anything else is taken to be a new filename to be written. |
CONSOLE, STDOUT and blank are synonyms for TERMINAL. The case of the value is
not significant and it may be abbreviated (except for filenames). When a new file is
to be written, any existing file of the same name will be saved as its filename with
appended. Any
existing filename
will be overwritten.
If the NEWFILE or OLDFILE=filename form is used on the command line, the ‘=’ must be protected from the parameter system which would assume you were trying to specify a parameter called NEWFILE or OLDFILE. There are two ways to do this:
"NEW=filename" (but note that the quotes will need
protecting from the shell so you end up with ’"NEW=filename"’, for example).
DEV=NEW=filename.