Micro Focus Dialog System™

Character Mode User Guide

MERANT™

Issue 6a
August 1999

MERANT has made every effort to ensure that this manual is correct and accurate, but reserves the right to make changes without notice at its sole discretion at any time.

The software described in this document is supplied under a license and may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms of such license, and in particular any warranty of fitness of MERANT software products for any particular purpose is expressly excluded and in no event will MERANT be liable for any consequential loss.

Micro Focus®, Animator® and COBOL Workbench® are registered trademarks of MERANT International Limited.
Dialog System™, Panels™, Screens™ and Micro Focus COBOL™ are trademarks of MERANT International Limited.
Microsoft® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.
Windows™ is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation
IBM® is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation
OS/2® is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation
UNIX® is a registered trademark of UNIX System Laboratories Incorporated
HP LaserJet ROMAN-8 ® is a registered trademark of Hewlett Packard Corporation

Copyright© 1999 MERANT International Limited.
All Rights Reserved.

Preface

This manual is part of Micro Focus Dialog System. It describes the features, applications and use of the Dialog System Character Mode Definition and Run-time software for DOS, OS/2 and UNIX environments.

Using this manual, the reader should be able to understand the purpose and capabilities of Dialog System, and use it to prototype, test, integrate and run a user interface.

Audience

Readers are expected to be familiar with the general concepts of business computing.

Notation in this Manual

• Enter refers to the carriage return or Enter key. Where commands to be typed are shown, the Enter key is not explicitly shown; it is treated as implicit that Enter must be pressed at the end of the line.

• Hexadecimal numbers are enclosed in quotation marks and preceded by a lower-case "x"; for example, x"9D".

• The term "window" means a delineated area of the screen normally smaller than the full screen.

The notation used to describe the format of command lines is as follows:

• Words printed in italics are generic terms representing names to be devised by you.

• Words printed in non-italics are the actual words you must enter. You must enter them in the exact case in which they appear.

• Material enclosed in square brackets [ ] is optional.

• When material is enclosed in braces { }, you must choose from the options within them. If there is only one option in the braces, the braces indicate repetition.

• The ellipsis (...) follows { } or [ ] and means you can repeat the material in the { } or [ ]. The number of repetitions allowed is unlimited unless otherwise stated. If the ellipsis is used with [ ], the material can be omitted altogether.

• If a command line will not fit across the page, it is continued on the next line; the continuation line is indented.

UNIX Considerations

• The term "UNIX" can be taken to mean all operating systems which are compatible with UNIX System V, Release 3 or later, complying with the System V Interface Definition (SVID).

• The commands given in this manual are specifically for the UNIX operating system. For all other similar operating system environments, you should refer to your Release Notes for details of the commands you need to use. You may also be referred to the Release Notes for other operating system specific details.

• All command line formats and examples are for the standard UNIX shell – the Bourne shell. If you are using another shell, see your UNIX documentation for the appropriate formats .

  Where examples showing environment variables do not specifically show them being exported to the shell, it is treated as implicit that envionment variables are exported.

• The keys described in this documentation are not available in all environments. References to pressing keys such as function or status keys imply the logical pressing and releasing of these keys rather than the physical keystrokes. A chart listing how your actual keystrokes map onto the keys shown in the documentation is provided as an appendix to this book.

• You may notice that what appears on your screen sometimes differs in minor ways from that illustrated in the manual. This will not affect the operation of your software.