The remainder of this chapter is an OpenVMS tutorial. It is brief and includes references for the reader who is interested in more details. This is information about OpenVMS that a manager, but not necessarily the unprivileged user, must know. Therefore, this section supplements the introductory topics found in most OpenVMS tutorials. Documents referenced in this section can be found at www.openvms.com:8000.

As with any other operating system, certain terms and concepts are unique to OpenVMS. The rest of this chapter introduces some of those unique characteristics. Without some understanding of Digital Command Language (DCL), the remainder of the book may not be as helpful as intended. This is by no means a complete treatment of the subject, however, and the reader is encouraged to delve into one of the references, especially Digital Press's OpenVMS User's Guide, before attempting any hands-on system management.

DCL is a command-line interface (not graphical) to the operating system. It tends to be more DOS-like than UNIX-like in that the commands are closer to English (e.g., dir, not ls). Commands (and file names) are not case sensitive, and most commands can be abbreviated.