Terminal tip: Running OS-level commands

Article

John Murray · Jun 23, 2017 3m read

#Best Practices #Terminal #Tips & Tricks #Caché

When working at the Caché command prompt I sometimes want to run an operating system command on the server host. By prefixing my command line with ! or $ I can do this with ease. The following examples are from 2017.1 on Windows, but the feature is available on all versions and platforms:

USER>!dir Volume in drive C has no label. Volume Serial Number is 2EF9-50B3 Directory of c:\intersystems\ens171\mgr\user 12/06/2017 12:41 <DIR> . 12/06/2017 12:41 <DIR> .. 02/02/2017 18:05 11,534,336 CACHE.DAT 16/06/2017 12:05 36 cache.lck 07/11/2016 17:18 <DIR> stream 2 File(s) 11,534,372 bytes 3 Dir(s) 83,540,684,800 bytes free USER>$dir Volume in drive C has no label. Volume Serial Number is 2EF9-50B3 Directory of c:\intersystems\ens171\mgr\user 12/06/2017 12:41 <DIR> . 12/06/2017 12:41 <DIR> .. 02/02/2017 18:05 11,534,336 CACHE.DAT 16/06/2017 12:05 36 cache.lck 07/11/2016 17:18 <DIR> stream 2 File(s) 11,534,372 bytes 3 Dir(s) 83,075,710,976 bytes free USER>
If I need to issue more than one command I can almost get myself an interactive shell:

USER>! c:\intersystems\ens171\mgr\user\> dir Volume in drive C has no label. Volume Serial Number is 2EF9-50B3 Directory of c:\intersystems\ens171\mgr\user 12/06/2017 12:41 <DIR> . 12/06/2017 12:41 <DIR> .. 02/02/2017 18:05 11,534,336 CACHE.DAT 16/06/2017 12:05 36 cache.lck 07/11/2016 17:18 <DIR> stream 2 File(s) 11,534,372 bytes 3 Dir(s) 83,075,211,264 bytes free c:\intersystems\ens171\mgr\user\> c:\intersystems\ens171\mgr\user\> date The current date is: 23/06/2017 Enter the new date: (dd-mm-yy) c:\intersystems\ens171\mgr\user\> c:\intersystems\ens171\mgr\user\> exit USER>

I wrote "almost" because in the example above the 'date' command prompted me to enter a new date but didn't wait for my keystrokes. It behaved as though I had immediately pressed Enter.

Still, I find it a useful feature.

To use it you will need the %System_Callout:USE privilege.