NetEx EFT213 Reference Manual Rel 5.4

Advanced Local User’s GuideIntroductionThis section is intended for users who already have a good working knowledge of NetEx/eFT and would liketo learn more details about the product. Site administrators responsible for NetEx/eFT as well as those usersdeveloping NetEx/eFT scripts and aliases will benefit most from this section.The majority of this section discusses how to develop a custom NetEx/eFT interface through the use of stringfunctions, input scripts, and aliases. The remainder of the section discusses advanced topics such as userdefinablehelp files and NetEx/eFT batch jobs.Special CharactersSeveral characters have special meaning to NetEx/eFT when it is parsing a command line. The position of thecharacter within a line is a determining factor on how NetEx/eFT will interpret it. The characters are:* The asterisk is treated as a comment character if it appears as the first character on the command line.That is, NetEx/eFT ignores the line. An alternate comment character is the pound sign character (‘#’in the United States). Comments are generally used within NetEx/eFT alias definitions and input filesto make them more readable for the user. The following are example NetEx/eFT comment lines:eFT> * This is a comment and is ignoredeFT> # The pound sign is treated as a comment too# The pound sign is identical to the ‘*’ character as described above.- The dash character has two meanings within NetEx/eFT. First, if it appears as the last character of acommand line, it tells NetEx/eFT to continue the command on the next line. NetEx/eFT then promptsfor more input. For example:eFT> set alias exampleMore>> text Example of continuing a command on next line.The second use of the dash character is to specify a qualifier to a NetEx/eFT command. A qualifiermust follow the dash without any spaces between the two. For example, to turn on quiet mode on theSEND command, the user would specify the QUIET qualifier as below:eFT> send -quiet source_file destination_fileTo tell NetEx/eFT to take the dash literally on a command line, escape it by typing two dashes in arow (i.e., ‘--‘).! The exclamation point is used by NetEx/eFT as the escape character for special command line processing.Depending upon its position within a command line, it is interpreted several different ways.First, the exclamation point is used to create multicommand aliases when it appears as the last characteron the command line (with no trailing spaces). For example, to create a two command alias calledNAME, the exclamation point is used as follows:eFT> set alias NAME {} ask -prompt "Enter Name: " name !More>> text Hello {name}.REF-eFT213-R5.4-08 Advanced Local User’s Guide Page 61