Sending Commands to the PC

The Natural statement DOWNLOAD PC FILE with the COMMAND clause can be used to send Entire Connection commands from Natural to the PC. See the Natural documentation for detailed information on this statement.

This document covers the following topics:

See the section Commands for descriptions of all Entire Connection commands.


Asynchronous Processing

Asynchronous processing is started when you issue the DOWNLOAD PC FILE statement as follows:

DOWNLOAD PC FILE work-file-number COMMAND command-name

where command-name can be any command which can also be entered in the command line of Entire Connection.

Processing on the host continues when the command has been recognized as being valid and when it has been started.

Synchronous Processing

This feature is available starting with Natural Version 4.1 for Mainframes and Natural Version 6.1 for UNIX.

Synchronous processing is started when you issue the DOWNLOAD PC FILE statement with the SYNC option:

DOWNLOAD PC FILE work-file-number COMMAND command-name SYNC

Processing on the host is not continued until the command has been completely executed on the PC.

When the DOWNLOAD PC FILE statement is used to execute a procedure file in synchronous mode, the following commands - when defined in the procedure file - cannot be executed since they require communication with the host:

CONNECT
DISCONNECT
EMULATE
LEARN
MONITOR
PAUSE
QA
QUIT
REC_BUFF
REC_SCR
REC_XFER
REVEAL
RSPMONITOR
SET (with the parameters listed below)
TOGGLE (with the parameters listed below)
TYPE
WAITFOR
WAITM

The following parameters of the commands SET and TOGGLE cannot be used in synchronous mode:

DISPLAY
EOSDELAY
EAB
INSTOGGLE
LOGOFF
LOGON
NTCON
NATFILE
NTCOFF
NUMLOCK
OEM
RESPONSE
STATUS
TCPADDR
TCPPORT

In addition, commands which use *SCREEN cannot be used in synchronous mode.

An error message occurs when one of the above commands or parameters is detected.

During the execution of a command or procedure file, the SYNC option can only be used in conjunction with the command SET PCFILE. See Specifying a File Name Using the SET Command.