What happens during PxPlus start up?

[Mike King]

When a new session of PxPlus starts up a number of programs are run in order to establish the environment and launch your application.

The programs run are as follows:

• Internally PxPlus determines the type of terminal being used to run PxPlus and runs its terminal setup program.  These are found in *dev directory.
  
  
  
  
  • For Windows this would be *dev/windows
  • 
    For WindX connections using Simple CS, NTHost or the Application server this will be *dev/winterm
  • 
    For Unix/Linux the system will get the terminal type from the environment variable TERM and run *dev/xxxxx where xxx is the terminal type in lowercase.  If this is not found the system will run *dev/termcap which will try to generate the device driver from the system termcap information.
    Note: For WindX connections using SSH or Telnet you should set the environment terminal type to winterm or ansi.
  
  The device driver will normally exit by running *TTY to load the device function and edit keys from the keyboard configuration file for the device.  This program will also check to see if there is a user device driver in *udev/devicetype and if present run it.
  
  
• Once the terminal is configured an internal CALL to "*start.up" is executed to do the following
  
  
  
  
  • Call "*plus/start_up" to handle Plus special PxPlus extensions
  • 
    Call your start up program specified in the environment variable PVXSTART or "START_UP" if the environment variable not set.
  • 
    Check your product activation to see if it is current or needs updating
  
  
• Runs the program specified on the command line if any (the "Lead" program found in LPG system variable).  If no program is specified the system will drop to the command line prompt.
  

If you want to set your system parameters, prefix(es), or do other initialization logic you generally will perform this in your start up program in the starting directory for PxPlus.  This will be run before your lead program is executed.

Note: As of PxPlus 2014, when using PxPlus Simple CS the system will run your START_UP program after the workstation connects.  Prior releases would run it before the connection was established.