1. FLOCK improvement: When trying to set a file or record lock with the wait option, if the wait exceeds 10 seconds, an entry is made in the QFLOCK.SYS table indicating the presence of the pending lock. This does not actually reserve the lock or have any other effect except that QUTL.LIT 2.2(119) or higher can now display such locks, indicating "" next to them.
This is mainly useful in tech support situations where you may be trying to figure out what a particular job is waiting for. Of course it would be better still if your application did its own waiting instead of relying on FLOCK.SBR to wait, thus allowing you to present meaningful information and possibly even an option to abort the wait. But if you have thousands of programs that would need updating, this may give you some of the benefit with a lot less work.
Also see item 6 under edit 759 below for another suggestion on getting status information while waiting for a lock.
2. QUTL.LIT 2.2(220), in addition to supporting the display of the locks, now also supports two command line switches to allow you to make a list file in non-interactive mode:
QUTL/FL ! create FLOCK list in QUTL.LST QUTL/FL:LOCK.LST ! create FLOCK list in LOCKS.LST QUTL/XL ! create XLOCK list in QUTL.LST QUTL/XL:ABCD.XYZ ! create XLOCK list in ABCD.XY
z3. Expand HEXDEC support within PRINT.SBR to include headers, titles and legends. Previously it only recognized and reformatted HEXDEC dates (e.g. 03/20/A1) within the data lines of the printout.
4. Fix two display anomalies within XCALL AMOS and XCALL HOSTEX that would not affect operation of your programs but might cause the screen display to appear incorrectly. The first problem was that color settings established within the child process (running under xcall AMOS) would remain in effect after return to the parent routine. Now, AMOS.SBR always restores its own foreground and background colors on return from the AMOS call.
The second problem only appeared under UNIX, and only when the subroutine was executing within its own process. In that case, if, prior to the XCALL AMOS or XCALL HOSTEX, you had output characters to the screen without a line terminator or other TCRT that would have forced the screen buffer to be flushed, then it was remotely possible that characters output by the child process might actually arrive at the terminal device prior to the previously buffered but not output characters in the parent process. This could produce all kinds of wierd effects, which were very hard to explain.
5. Fix an operational problem with XCALL AMOS,COMMAND$,"Q" (quiet mode) under UNIX, in which certain commands, like DIR with no arguments, would not operate properly due to a stray "%" on the end of the command line.
6. Windows 95 fix: Winsock 2 (WS2_32.DLL) is no longer needed to launch A-Shell. (It is still needed, however, if you use any of the routines which use sockets, such as EMAILX, TCPCLI, and TCPSRV.) This dependency was accidentally introduced in edit 763. Note that the same issue applies to all other versions of Windows, but is less noticeable since all the newer versions typically come with Winsock 2 installed.
7. XCALL PCKLST now optionally supports the INMEMO MMOCLR parameter, allowing you to customize the colors. The new calling interface is:
XCALL PCKLST,ROW,COL,ANS,ARRAY,MAX,PROMPT,EXTCOD, {,STROW,STCOL,FLAGS,FILE,MMOCLR}.
The parameter are described in the A-Shell User's Guide Rev E01 and also in the UPDATE.TXT for Version 4.4(596) (UPDATE42.TXT on the download page at www.microsabio.com.)
Note that the FILE parameter may now be specified as a null string ("") which is now necessary if you are going to pass MMOCLR but aren't using file mode. Similarly, the STROW, STCOL and FLAGS parameters may be set to 0 as dummy placeholders. MMOCLR is documented in the AMOS INMEMO User's Guide, but for those that don't have it:
MAP1 MMOCLR ! INMEMO colors
MAP2 BFCLR,B,1,-1 ! border fg
MAP2 BBCLR,B,1,-1 ! border bg
MAP2 TFCLR,B,1,-1 ! text fg
MAP2 TBCLR,B,1,-1 ! text bg
MAP2 AFCLR,B,1,-1 ! arrows fg
MAP2 ABCLR,B,1,-1 ! arrows bg
MAP2 PFCLR,B,1,-1 ! prompt fg
MAP2 PBCLR,B,1,-1 ! prompt bg
MAP2 WFCLR,B,1,-1 ! warnings & messages fg
MAP2 WBCLR,B,1,-1 ! "
"
" bg
MAP2 SFCLR,B,1,-1 ! orig. status line fg
MAP2 SBCLR,B,1,-1 ! orig. status line bg
MAP2 RFCLR,B,1,-1 ! reserved fg (unused)
MAP2 RBCLR,B,1,-1 ! reserved bg (" " )
9. SET TRACE FOPENS ON now logs closes as well (to ashell.log).
