[Simh] Transferring the licence file to the VAX emulator

[Paul Koning]

> On Dec 17, 2018, at 12:29 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> The problem is the license manager code you are running into is expecting an RMS file, not a Stream I/O.  In the old days, the idea of 'access methods' was the natural ways OS's did I/O and RMS was VMS's answer.   Since today's programmers tend to have grown up with C/C++/Java and stream I/O, you need to think in terms of a programming 'Framework' that is inflicting some level structure on the file.  FWIW: Stream style I/O and the STREAM-LF file format was added to VMS to support VAX11/C, and normal programmers (correctly) started to avoid RMS (it was funny how quickly the compiler runtime teams abandoned RMS, but I digress).  But if the code was written assuming RMS (which was all VMS had for many years), the files need RMS.

That's odd, I thought that (on VMS) you didn't have any choice about using RMS.  Well, not unless doing raw block I/O.

Stream is one of the formats supported by RMS, exactly as fixed and variable records (with prefix length) are.  Actually, stream comes in three flavors, depending on whether the record delimiter is LF, CR, or CR/LF.  RMS-11 also supports these, FWIW.

So unless license manager goes out of its way to enforce a particular record format for its input files, I would think it "should just work", RMS should read the on-disk format and deliver the records (lines) according to the encoding described by the file attributes.

Finally, one suggestion was to transfer the file by cut & paste into a VMS editor; in that case the record format is chosen by the editor when creating the file, and the fact you're pasting from a Unix system is not a factor.

	paul