VISTA Plus for MPE Administrator's Guide

NBSpool Commands
3-13
XEQ Command
The XEQ command executes one or more of the NBSpool commands either once or repetitively.
The major use of this command is to execute various NBSpool functions in a background job. The
command first parses all commands in the input file. If any command is not valid, the entire XEQ
command is terminated. As each command is parsed, it will be displayed with a special X> prompt.
Continuation lines are valid up to 254 characters.
If a command line begins with an asterisk (*), the entire command line is ignored. This allows
comments to be inserted in the XEQ file.
Not all commands are valid in an XEQ file. In general, all commands that require interaction with
a user are disabled, such as TEXT, LIST, VIEW, and LOGON. Two new commands, END and
ERROR, also appear and are described below. Any responses normally entered by the user will be
suppressed, so any “YES or NO” questions will be assumed to be answered YES.
When commands are being executed, the actual command will not be displayed unless the SHOW
parameter is specified on the original XEQ command. If SHOW is not used, commands will be
displayed only if one or more spool files qualifies for the command. In this case, a time stamp will
be appended to the “n Spool Files Qualify” message as well.
Repetitive Execution
When the XEQ command’s REPEAT or WAIT parameter is specified, the XEQ command will
repeat its list of commands from the beginning after pausing for the desired time. To allow for
stopping this repeated execution, each NBSpool process using XEQ repeating is assigned a number
from 1 to 8, unless SET MAXPROCS is used, which allows up to 99 processes. The number is
displayed on the console and $STDLIST, and can be used with the XEQSTOP command.
By default, NBSpool assigns the next available process number. If the XEQ command’s
PROCNUM parameter specifies a number from 1 to 8, that number will be used. If another process
is using this number, the XEQ command will fail. This prevents duplicate executions of the same
XEQ job.
Upon completion of all commands, one of three things will occur. If a WAIT or REPEAT is
specified, the command will pause the desired number of seconds and then repeat from the
beginning. If neither parameter was specified or if the repeat count has been reached, the command
stops. Finally, if an XEQSTOP command was entered, the command will terminate.