Editing Bytestream files

Editing Bytestream files

Every day, more and more Posix applications and utilities are available for MPE systems. Many of these require a one time setup and very little ongoing maintenance. The configuration files are typically stored in the HFS namespace as bytestream type files preventing standard text editors like EDIT/3000 from directly editing the files. If you have Qedit or you know how to use VI then you can edit them directly.

What do you do then if you don’t have Qedit? By far the easiest way to edit the file is to convert it from a bytestream file to a standard Ascii file in MPE namespace, edit the file as you would any other text file, and then convert it back to bytestream format. Here is how to do it. I am using the configuration file for Samba/iX as my example. The configuration file is named smb.conf and is in a subdirectory named “lib” directly off of the MPE group named PUB.SAMBA. The fully qualified file name is /SAMBA/PUB/lib/smb.conf.

:HELLO MGR.SAMBA

<< the following command creates flat file SMBCONF.PUB.SAMBA from bytestream file /SAMBA/PUB/lib/smb.conf >>

:FROMBYTE.HPBIN.SYS  "lib/smb.conf SMBCONF"
<< make changes >>
:EDITOR
/T  SMBCONF
/L ALL
/M 9
...
/KEEP
/EXIT

<< the following command converts SMBCONF to bytestream and saves it as lib/smb.conf >>

:TOBYTE.HPBIN.SYS "-at SMBCONF lib/smb.conf"