More VMS

From: Ethan Dicks <erd_6502_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Thu Mar 28 13:52:00 2002

--- Huw Davies <Huw.Davies_at_kerberos.davies.net.au> wrote:
> At 10:16 AM 27/03/2002 +0000, Alan Pearson wrote:
> >As an aside to the current VMS discussion, does anyone know
> >of an equivalent to the Unix "su -" command for VMS?
>
> 3) I suspect that someone will have created a SU program as well - this
> isn't too hard to write (not that I'm volunteering).

We used to have one back in the old days. It had to be installed
with CMKRNL so that it could poke around in the process header
space. It was VMS-version specific because it poked values into
your process header using compile-time offset constants. I remember
there was one small bit of odd behavior relating to VMS privs that
was non-intuitive, but for 99.997% of what we did, you *became* that
other user.

Very dangerous stuff. VMS will crash if you do the wrong thing when
in Kernal Mode. We had a couple of utilities that had to be rebuilt
when we updated VMS - one that did an "su" and one that worked like
"w" (telling you all about the other login processes, including what
command they were running and some other stuff that SHOW PROCESS didn't
show you).

These were written in the VMS 3.6ish days and brought along to VMS 4.x.
I could dig them out, but I doubt they were ever ported to VMS 5.x,
let alone anything "modern".

-ethan


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Received on Thu Mar 28 2002 - 13:52:00 GMT

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