Chdir problem

[Bill Vermillion]

As GCC Consulting was scratching "For a good prime call 
391581 * 2^216193 -1" on the wall, he suddenly said:

>  
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: filepro-list-bounces at lists.celestial.com 
> > [mailto:filepro-list-bounces at lists.celestial.com] On Behalf 
> > Of Fairlight
> > Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2004 8:21 PM
> > To: Filepro 2 List
> > Subject: Re: Chdir problem

> > Yo, homey, in case you don' be listenin', GCC Consulting done said:

> > > What I would like to do is have use filePro 's system
> > > command to print this report.

> > > Sounds simple however this is a functional acknowledgement
> > > from there customers and each acknowledgement is located in
> > > a different directory. It looks something like this:

> > > C:\edate\GEIS-A\customer_name\ANSI\997\all\997.rpt

> > > The variable here is the customer name and the date of the file 
> > > 997.rpt

> > > I need to search each customer directory, get the name
> > > and if 997.rpt's date is equal to today's date, store
> > > the directory name in an array. Once I have all of the
> > > positives, I would the loop through the array appending the
> > > name into the command an printing the report.

> > > Any suggestions on how to best accomplish this will be greatly 
> > > appreciated.

> > Are you trying to do all this in fP, or use an external?

> Since the EDI program( not fp) which generates the 977.rpt
> ASCII file isn't printing it correctly, I want use fp to "walk"
> thru each directory and using the system command, print the
> report.

> There are at least 8 possible edi customer directories which
> have to be checked for a current 997.rpt file.

> > I mean, if you have a report and simply need to print a 
> > report for any customer name whose 997.rpt is of today's 
> > date, this is something that's trivial to do in perl, and you 
> > could just execute *report from inside there.  Unless they 
> > did something really cool with time and date as far as 
> > handling files (I remember Ken mentioning some @STAT array or 
> > something very similar, though I forget when it's populated) 
> > that might have this info, it's going to be a PITA to obtain 
> > and convert that internally to anything useful.
> > 
> > What you're trying to do could be done as a cron job, system 
> > call, or whatever, with a tiny little perl program doing the 
> > grunt work.  Not hard.

> Can't use cron as this is a Windows system. I can have the EDI
> program initiate the batch file to run this program.

I will not accept 'This is a Windows system" as an excuse for not
running cron. Go ahead an run cron. And you can run most of the
other unix programs you are used to. You' sed, awk, perl, tr,
cut, tar, cpio, gawk, gcc, g++. You get things such as ps, kill,
xterm, ftp and even sendmail. For an editor you can use vim.

All that of course is assuming your Windows is a fairly recent Windows
system.  You did NOT mention the version of Windows and that's just
as important as mentioning the versions of Unix.

If it's Windows 2000, Windows 2003, or Windows XP, go to the MS
site and download the >FREE< SFU 3.5.  SFU - Services For Unix.

When you drop into the ksh you could easily think you are in a
Unix system.  Almost all the commands you want are there - about
250 of them - the 'ls' commands work just like Unix.  So does
piping things through 'less'.

If someone brought that up in full-screen mode and the user was
not a heavy Unix user, they might not be able to tell the
different.  It's not small at 238MB, but it surely makes
some things easy.   You can even see your disk drives
in the /dev directory.

> > Probably not the way you'd like to do it, but it's how -I- 
> > would do it, given the same problem--assuming I understand it fully. 
> Also, I would prefer to stay with fp and the programs available
> without installing another program.

SFU is a lot of programs.  But it may be just the tool you need to
do unix-like things in the MS world.

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com