Dollar Commands

Any shell commands can be issued from QCL by prefixing the command line with $.

$<shell command>

The complete string of characters after the $ sign are passed to the system. Note that there are several symbolic names which are used by QCL to keep track of do loop structures etc. when a $ command is issued. These all start with QCL_ and must not be altered by the shell process.

The use of single dollar actually spawns the shell command as a sub-process. Some shell commands only remain "active" for the duration of that sub-process, e.g. cd. For these commands it is required to stop the current QCL process, execute the shell command and then restart QCL. This can be achieved using double dollar.

         
qcl>$$cd <directory>