Re**2: piping scripts into isql: bang escapes

Path: emory!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!gossip.pyramid.com!pyramid!infmx!news From: cortesi@informix.com (David Cortesi) Newsgroups: comp.databases.informix Message-ID: <1992Jan14.163521.29230@informix.com> Date: 14 Jan 92 16:35:21 GMT References: <1992Jan13.193649.15202@informix.com> Sender: news@informix.com (Usenet News) Reply-To: cortesi@informix.com Organization: Informix Software, Inc. > first off, jjamison@bellahs.UUCP (John Jamison) asked, I am told there is an undocumented flag for isql that allows you to pipe in an sql script into isql...Can anybody give me the name? > I responded that "isql <database> -" would do it and gave this example: isql stores - <<eot! select * from systables where tabid > 99; eot! > Jamison wasn't satisfied... I am told there is an undocumented flag which presents you with a ">" prompt or something, sort of a back door into isql in which you don't have all the menus and special keys, etc. > and rightly so, as Craig Browning pointed out... The "isql - -" command Dave Cortesi mentioned will give you the ">" prompt to work with in an interactive session. A session could look something like this: % isql - - > database stores;Database selected. > select * from customer;etc. That was news to us here in tech pubs [of course it came AFTER the 5.0 manuals went to press :-( ] but even more interesting news came today. When operating in piped mode this way, ISQL will accept an initial "!" as meaning escape to shell. Here is how it looks using 4.1 software on a Sun: [gort 7] isql stores - > select avg(customer_num) from customer where fname matches "[A-G]*"; > (avg) 115.06 1 row(s) retrieved. > !echo hello from the shell hello from the shell > ^D