status

Report the status of an ISAM file

The status utility generates a report that describes the organizational characteristics of a specified ISAM file and indicates how many records are currently in the file.

To run status,

dbr DBLDIR:status

run DBLDIR:status

To find out what the valid input is at any prompt, enter a question mark character (?). To terminate status at any time, type the end-of-file character for your operating system.

On OpenVMS, the status utility always returns 90,000,000 as the number of records in an RMS ISAM file, as it relies on the ISSTS subroutine. There is no way to find this information on an RMS file unless you read sequentially through the file.

The status utility only displays basic record and key information for a file. To view more detailed information, use the ipar utility.

Sample status

The following example is run on UNIX.

Enter ISAM file name: cusmas

File to write status to: cusmas

Enter ISAM file name: ^D

… normal termination of STATUS

In our example, status writes the following information to a sequential file named cusmas.ddf:

The record length for this file is 2000 characters.  
There are 5 keys.
There are currently 100 records in this ISAM file.
Primary key is name
The key is 30 characters long, segmented and is ordered in descending
 sequence with no duplicates allowed.
This key may not be modified by WRITE.
  Segment #1 starts at 16 with length 15.
  Segment #2 starts at 1 with length 15.
1st alternate is company
The key is 30 characters long, starting at position 31 within the record,
and is ordered in ascending sequence with duplicates allowed.
This key may not be modified by WRITE.
2nd alternate is address
The key is 40 characters long, segmented and is ordered in ascending
sequence with duplicates allowed.
This key may be modified by WRITE.
  Segment #1 starts at 61 with length 20.
  Segment #2 starts at 51 with length 10.
  Segment #3 starts at 91 with length 10.
3rd alternate is act_code
The key is 5 characters long, starting at position 101 within the record,
and is ordered in ascending sequence with duplicates allowed.
This key may not be modified by WRITE.
4th alternate is cust_number
The key is 10 characters long, starting at position 120 within the record, and is ordered in ascending sequence with no duplicates allowed.
This key may not be modified by WRITE.

Running the status utility

To illustrate how you use status, let’s assume we want to report the status of our ISAM file, cusmas.ism. The status utility prompts us as follows for the information needed to retrieve the status of our ISAM file. (The example to which we refer throughout this section is found in Sample status.)

• Enter ISAM file name: Enter the name of the ISAM file for which you want to report the current status. The default extension is .ism.

In our example, we entered the filename cusmas to report the current status of our ISAM file, cusmas.ism.

• File to write status to: Enter the name of the output file to which you want to write the status report of the specified ISAM file. The default extension is .ddf. If the specified file already exists, status generates a “Cannot supersede existing file” error ($ERR_REPLAC) and prompts you for another output file.

If you press Enter at this prompt without specifying a filename, the status report is sent to the terminal.

The status utility closes each output file at the conclusion of the status operation. After sending the status report to the specified output file or terminal, status repeats the first prompt. If you want to terminate status operations, type the end-of-file character.

In our example, we entered the filename cusmas to send the status report to a sequential file named cusmas.ddf, and then typed the end-of-file character to terminate the status utility.