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.