JKEYAUTO PROGRAM JKEYAUTO PROGRAMBegin execution of an external program, but don't wait until the program terminates. This is basically the program you want to control using jkeyauto This program can then have keyboard input 'fed' to it at a later stage in your script by using the INPUT statement. There can be any number of PERFORM statements in a script (or the same PERFORM statement executed more than once!!) However some Unix systems do sometimes limit the number of open file descriptors per process, and this may be a problem (systems such as AIX have a very high default limit). You can usually reconfigure the kernel if this is a problem.
The following variables are set up following execution of this statement which can be examined later by your script.
$? The return code from loading the program. Generally 0 means the program loaded okay, and any other value is an error.
$PIPE The pipe number of the loaded program. This generally starts at 0 and increments each time you use the PERFORM statement. You can use this later in the INPUT statement to pass keyboard input to this program.
$PID The process id of the loaded program.
program expression (STDOUT expression_stdout} {STDERR expression_stderr} {SETTING variable_setting}
expression describes the program to start. This program is not executed though a shell, so normal shell meta-characters such as * ? > are not expanded.
expression_stdout can optionally be used to show what device or file to copy the program output to. By default all the output of the program is captured internally by jkeyauto. Using this option you can tell jkeyauto to copy this captured data to another device or file. The special name _-_ shows jkeyauto to re-direct the output to the same terminal as jkeyauto.
expression_stderr can optionally be used to re-direct the stderr output of the program. Again you can use '-' as a special case.
variable_setting can be used to store the success code of loading the
program. This is usually 0 and will only be set to other values in
extreme circumstances, such as running out of system resources.
JBCPORTNO = 50
loopcounter = 0
portincr = 3
filename = "CUSTOMERS"
again:
putenv "JBCPORTNO=":JBCPORTNO
putenv "JBCCONNECT="
outfile = "progout-":$loopcounter
perform "thisprog":" ":filename STDOUT
"progout-":loopcounter
loopcounter=loopcounter+1
JBCPORTNO=JBCPORTNO+portincr
if loopcounter lt 10 then goto again
In the above example, 10 programs are loaded in the background. They have a range of port numbers from 50 to 77 in increments of 3 (by resetting JBCCONNECT we can be confident a new port number will be allocated). The terminal output is redirected to a file named from "progout-0" through "progout-9".
The internal variable $PIPE will be set to the pipe number allocated for this program
and this pipe number is used in other statements such as the WAIT or INPUT statements. The
internal variable $? is also set to the success code of loading the program (see
variable_setting). The internal variable $PID is set to the process id that the operating
system allocated for this new process.
JKEYAUTO