Reply: screen flashing

The question is whether there is a cure for a flashing screen now that they have gone and updated their Informix to 4.1. The answer is yes, but you first have to know at exactly what point the screen flashes and then change you code appropriately. This means that the screen flashing can be caused by a DISPLAY statement in a window or screen. I found this screen flashing as well and found that if I opened a full screen window to execute a RUN statement in, then close the window on completion, that the screen flashing disappeared. Similar steps were taken anywhere the program swapped from one environment to the other, like displaying a line in one window from another. Another problem with using the RUN command is that you have to specifically clip the string in the call - extraneous spaces at the end of the string are now passed to the unix shell and this will definitely cause problems for some shell commands. The response to use a C wrapper to perform a system call is a better way to go in the long run (much more flexibility in handling return values), but since not everyone wants to write C code (and since you still have to be careful about trailing blanks in the string), using windows will help. John R. Carter 71553.535@compuserve.com Informix Programmer/Analyst