A tour of MTS commands

Once how you’ve learnt how to work with files in MTS it’s easy to use the built in MTS commands - there are less than 50 commands and they follow the same basic syntax.

This post will give a quick tour of the commands available in MTS. I’ve grouped them by topic and provided a very brief summary for each.

As always, you can optionally start commands with $, commands can be abbreviated, eg FILESTATUS to FI, and there are some command synonyms shown with / below, such as HELP/EXPLAIN.

General commands

SET and DISPLAY respectively set and show a large number of different settings such as printer settings, passwords, how MTS displays help etc.

File commands

A quick illustration of the difference between COPY and DUPLICATE:

# create x
  File "X" has been created.
# copy *source* x
> Hello world
> Welcome to MTS
> Goodbye!
> $endfile
# list x
 
       1     Hello world
       2     Welcome to MTS
       3     Goodbye!
# create y
  File "Y" has been created.
# copy x(2,3) y
# list y
 
       1     Welcome to MTS
       2     Goodbye!
# duplicate x z
  File "X" has been duplicated as "Z"; size=1 page; access=Unlim Owner,
   None Others
# list z
 
       1     Hello world
       2     Welcome to MTS
       3     Goodbye!

EMPTY effectively deletes a file and then recreates it with no contents. TRUNCATE will remove space allocated to the file but not used - handy for when disk usage was paid for but less so on an emulated system.

Sessions

Run programs

Devices and queues

System information

Utilities

Programming

Other commands of less use for Hercules users

Networking on MTS needed special hardware, so the messaging and network system commands will not be of much use.

Further information

There is online help for each command which you can access directly eg HELP CALC. Full documentation on how to use the commands and what command line parameters are available is available in MTS Volume 1.

In future posts I will go into more detail on some of the more complex or interesting commands.

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