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Hyphen Or No Hyphen When Accessing DBACCESS

Hyphen Or No Hyphen When Accessing DBACCESS

Question:
When accessing DBACCESS from a script, what are the consequences of leaving out the hyphen? What should we adopt as a standard, hyphen or no hyphen?

Example:

dbaccess mystores - <

OR

dbaccess mystores <

Answer:
The hyphen represents the default behavior and can be omitted with no consequences in normal scripts. Things may get more complicated if you call scripts from within other scripts. In those cases, the standard input may get confused.

I would use the hyphen as a more conservative standard. Support people probably will be more familiar with that construct, and it leaves another potential problem out of the mix when you're trying to debug.

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