Re: CMD prompt question

[Douglas Handy <dhandy1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Eric,

>The boss thinks this is a bug in the email utility, so he asked me if I
>could fix it....  

It is a bug (feature?) in whatever is generating the command string to invoke
the email utility.  The OS command parser naturally requires quotes around a
parameter value with embedded blanks.  But it also requires quotes around a
value with certain non-blank characters, including the hyphen.  This is because
it could be construed as an expression rather than a character string.

Note that is at the command parsing stage, and has nothing to do with the
command prompter.  For example, type this command and press Enter:

  SNDMSSG MSG(e-mail) TOUSR(*SYSOPR)

and you'll get CPD0104 (Expression not allowed for parameter MSG).

>I'm not sure I disagree, except that this seems to be
>standard behavior for command prompts.  

It is standard behavior for parsing command strings, whether or not prompted.

>Anyway, command prompts are NOT a specialty of mine, so I'm fishing for
>ideas.  Could a command validation program help with this?  

No, because it doesn't get that far.  The problem is that the OS won't treat a
non-quoted value containing a hyphen as a string, it treats it as an expression
and the hyphen as a subtraction operator.

Just change your program building the command string to always add quotes; they
never hurt anything.

Doug