Overview

THIS CHAPTER REVIEWS SOME BASIC OpenVMS concepts, which any user of OpenVMS must understand in order to use the operating system effectively. You may already understand all the concepts presented here, but a review is certainly helpful. If you find yourself stumbling over these ideas, it is best to study them in more detail by reading the volume OpenVMS User's Manual in the OpenVMS Documentation Set. All the concepts presented in this chapter are described in greater detail in subsequent chapters of this book.

2.1 An Interactive Session

An interactive OpenVMS session is initiated by logging in to OpenVMS from a terminal. OpenVMS creates an interactive process, which can perform work on your behalf. The process executes the programs making up the applications that you choose to run on the VAX or Alpha system. These programs may be supplied by DIGITAL, purchased from third-party software vendors, or written at your own site.

A OpenVMS process has many items of information associated with it. Here are of the more interesting items:

• The user name with which you logged in to OpenVMS. This may be your actual name or some other identifier for your account.

• The name of the OpenVMS process. For your first interactive session, the process name is the same as your user name.

• The name of the terminal at which you logged in. You use this terminal to tell OpenVMS what to do, and OpenVMS uses it to display information.

2.2 The DCL Command Interpreter