PowerHouse Migration Questions -- Batch jobs on unix

[John MacLerran]

Howdy List-ers!

We are in the <sarcasm> wonderful, glorious, breathtaking </sarcasm> 
process of migrating from MPE to unix. One thing (of many) that is 
raising some questions is how best to handle PowerHouse in batch on unix 
(HP-UX specifically). Does anyone have some 'best practice' tips?  A 
couple of the most pressing issues are 'inline' code and prompting.

By inline code, I mean something like this:
    !quiz dict=xyqdb.prod.acct
    acc filexyz
    set rep lim 42
    set rep dev printer
    go
    exit
    !eoj

I know this gives unix fits, because of the way it handles stdin.  My 
understanding of the best way to handle the above would be to break the 
quiz code out into another file, then do a quiz auto=yadayada...  My 
question is "is that _really_ the best way, or am I overlooking 
something?"  I know this is a long shot, but does anyone have a script 
(MPE, mpex, qedit, sh, or Perl) that will parse a job and attempt to 
break it into separate files in preparation for changing the jobs to use 
the auto= notation?

By prompting, I mean this:  we use streamx to prompt for user input at 
job submission time.  The above quiz could look like this:
!quiz dict=xyqdb.prod.acct
acc filexyz
set rep lim ?enter report limit?
set rep dev printer
go
exit
!eoj

We also do more complex prompting, where we substitute the variables in 
via the {} notation in streamx, but the concept is similar.  Can 
PowerHouse even prompt in batch on unix?  Would it be better to re-code 
the jobs to use system variables?  Can items like the report limit above 
even be defined that way?

I'd also be curious to find out which batch job 'handlers' are being 
used by other PowerHouse shops, and which, if any, are 'better' than 
others.  (Price is a consideration, but not the only consideration -- 
some 'extra' money is available, as upper management understands the need.)

So, any takers?

--

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  John MacLerran
  IT Systems Analyst                       email:   macljohn@isu.edu
  Idaho State University                             V(208) 282-2954
  http://www.isu.edu/~macljohn                       F(208) 282-3673
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