Added November 2024
A-Shell uses the term job to refer to an individual instance or session, i.e a task or process in the lexicon of Windows and UNIX. Although each A-Shell is also a native host operating system task/process, and thus has a process id (pid), in the A-Shell context they are identified by job names and job numbers. Job names are one-to-six upper case characters, either specified by command line switch, or assigned automatically, in which case they are of the form TSKAAA, TSKAAB, ... or TASAAA, TASAAB, ... for foreground and background jobs, respectively. Job numbers range from one to the maximum concurrent number of jobs, with the numbers reused as jobs exit.
A-Shell jobs are tracked in a shared file JOBTBL.SYS, normally stored in the same directory as the A-Shell Configuration File but specifically as specified by the QUEUE System Parameter, that is dynamically created when the first job is launched, and removed when the last job exits. For more information relating to the Job Table, see the following topics:
System Parameters
| • | MAXINST: maximum number of jobs allowed to originate from a single workstations |
| • | MAXJOBS: maximum number of jobs to allow total |
| • | QUEUE: location for both QFLOCK.SYS and JOBTBL.SYS |
System Commands
| • | SYSTAT: detailed job table display/list |
| • | ASTAT: dynamic job table display |
| • | JSTAT: dynamic display of a single job |
| • | SEND: send message to a job |
Subroutines
| • | MX_KILL: send signals to jobs (analogous to UNIX kill command) |
