For native IBM i commands such as Work with Writers (WRKWTR), Work with User Jobs (WRKUSRJOB), Work with Submitted Jobs (WRKSBMJOB), and Work with Active Jobs (WRKACTJOB), it's possible to reply to pending inquiry messages for the writer or job in question by means of these commands' list panels' option 7=Display message. The internal IBM program providing this functionality is called QMHSCLVL and is also employed by other message-related commands, including Display Messages (DSPMSG), Work with Messages (WRKMSG), and Display Job Log (DSPJOBLOG). Unfortunately there's no API to get that same information in your own application--that's the problem that this APIs by Example addresses.

I just got back from an eventful week at the RPG & DB2 Summit conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. While I was there, I made videos of the conference, and I've put them online for anyone interested.

The keynote address was given by Ian Jarman of IBM. Mr. Jarman discussed the value of the i+p merger at IBM, as well as what's coming in hardware. He also gave a sneak preview of IBM i 7.1 features and a brief synopsis of the new RPG Open I/O support.

In a recent discussion in the System iNetwork forums, someone asked how to write a CL program that receives a null-terminated parameter. My initial reaction was that this was a silly thing to do in CL. However, as I thought about it, it started to make a lot more sense.

After all, if you call a CL program or procedure from C, you'll certainly want to be able to handle null-terminated strings. But perhaps even more useful is the fact that, if you write a CL program that's called from a QShell command or script, it'll pass null-terminated strings. And calling CL from QShell can be very useful indeed!

Q: We are using your articles on OpenSSH to act as an SFTP server. However, we're having trouble starting the server properly. I can start it manually in QShell and it works okay, but I can't seem to get it to start automatically. Any advice?

A: On IBM i 6.1, IBM has provided the ability to start the OpenSSH server (sshd) via the STRTCPSVR command. If you are on an earlier release (prior to 6.1) however, there's a free utility you can download from IBM to start the OPenSSH server.