Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

vmsish

Controls VMS-specific language features. Currently, there are four VMS-specific features available: status ($?), exit, time, and hushed. If you’re not using VMS, then this module won’t have any affect.

vmsish is shipped with the Perl 5.8 source kit.

For example, without vmsish, you can’t execute a hushed version of exit:

$ perl -e"exit 44;" Non-hushed error exit
%SYSTEM-F-ABORT, abort DCL message $ show sym $STATUS $STATUS ==
"%X0000002C"

When you use vmsish, you get . . . nothing!

$ perl -e"use vmsish qw(hushed); exit 44;"

vmsish implements the following options.

status

Causes $? and system to return the native VMS exit status instead of emulating the POSIX exit status.

exit

Causes exit 1 to produce a successful exit (with status SS$_NORMAL) instead of emulating Unix exit(), which considers exit 1 as an indication of an error. As with the CRTL’s exit() function, exit 0 is also mapped to an exit status of SS$_NORMAL, and any other argument to exit() is used directly as Perl’s exit status.

time

Makes all times relative to the local time zone instead of the default Universal Time (a.k.a. Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT).

hushed

Suppresses printing of VMS status messages to SYS$OUTPUT and SYS$ERROR if Perl terminates with an error status and allows programs that are expecting Unix-style Perl to avoid parsing VMS error messages. It does not supress any messages from Perl itself, just the messages generated by DCL after Perl exits. The DCL symbol $STATUS will still have the termination status, ...