Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Redman, Russell O." <[email protected]> · Mon, 25 Jun 2001 14:53:07 -0700

I have been attempting to use the genSub record in my databases (developed
with SCHEDIT 3.10.2 for EPICS R3.13.4 using the Cygwin32 bash shell under
Windows NT 4.01).  Until today I have not succeeded in getting a genSub
record to survive the conversion from the CapFast schematic into the
database.  

I have localized the problem to an unfortunate interaction between schedit
and e2db.  The CapFast symbols for the genSub record all have file names
with mixed case (egenSub.sym, etc.).  Schedit converts all the file names
into lower case when they are written into the .sch files.  For most
DOS/Windows programs this would be harmless, but e2db was written under Unix
and demands an exact match between the symbol names in the .sch files and in
the infamous edb.def file.  My records were being discarded because egensub
does not match egenSub exactly.  (I have checked that the symbol file names
have the correct cases in the epics.mnu file.)

I suspect that this problem is unique to the PC version of CapFast, since
the case of file names is always important under Unix whereas many DOS and
Windows utilities fiddle the cases unpredictably.  

As a short term work-around, I have renamed all the genSub symbol file names
in my installation into lower case, and have edited my epics.mnu files to
suit.  With this minor change I can produce working records.  I am NOT
suggesting that the genSub tar ball be modified in this way since it would
probably break a fair amount of existing code developed on Unix platforms,
but other EPICS programmers working on Windows platforms may find the record
more useful knowing about this simple fix.

On a longer time scale, I think it would be appropriate for CapFast under
Windows NT and 2000 to preserve the original case for symbol names as given
in the menu files, as it surely must under Unix.  

Cheers,
Russell O. Redman

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System