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The Question is:
One day I was typing to quickly and instead of doing a $dir *.sav;* I typed in
$*.sav;* and hit return. The system responded with "Waiting to tune system .
. ." at which point I immediately panicked of course, did a few control y's
and got back to the $
prompt. But the question remains - What was the system trying to do?
The Answer is :
Look for a file $*.* in your DCL$PATH.
If the command input is unrecognized as a DCL verb or as a symbol, then
the DCL$PATH mechanism will activate and will attempt to match the input
against a filename, and it accepts wildcards. DCL looks for a filename
matching the input with a default file specification of DCL$PATH:.COM
first, then again with a default file specification of DCL$PATH:.EXE.
For example, if you have A.COM and B.COM in an otherwise empty directory,
then the DCL command * will invoke A.COM. For entertainment purposes,
you can enter the command DEFINE * B.COM, and then the command input *
will invoke B.COM.
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