VAL(1) General Commands Manual VAL(1)

val — validate SCCS files (DEVELOPMENT)

val -

val [-s][-m name][-r SID][-y type] file...

The val utility determines if the specified file is an SCCS file meeting the characteristics specified by the options.

The val utility supports the XBD specification, , except that the usage of the - operand is not strictly as intended by the guidelines (that is, reading options and operands from standard input). The following options are supported:

Specify a name , which is compared with the SCCS %M% keyword in file . (See get(1) ).
Specify a SID (SCCS Identification String), an SCCS delta number. A check is made to determine if the SID is ambiguous (for example, -r 1 is ambiguous because it physically does not exist but implies 1.1, 1.2, and so on, which may exist) or invalid (for example, -r 1.0 or -r 1.1.0 are invalid because neither case can exist as a valid delta number). If the SID is valid and not ambiguous, a check is made to determine if it actually exists.
Silence the diagnostic message normally written to standard output for any error that is detected while processing each named file on a given command line.
Specify a type , which is compared with the SCCS %Y% keyword in file . (See get(1) ).

The following operands are supported:

file
A pathname of an existing SCCS file. If a single instance file is specified as -, and if no options are specified, the standard input is read: each line is independently processed as if it were a command-line argument list. (However, the line is not subjected to any of the shell word expansions, such as parameter expansion or quote removal.)

The standard input is a text file used only when the file operand is specified as -.

Any SCCS files processed are files of an unspecified format.

The following environment variables affect the execution of val :

Provide a default value for the internationalisation variables that are unset or null. If LANG is unset or null, the corresponding value from the implementation-dependent default locale will be used. If any of the internationalisation variables contains an invalid setting, the utility will behave as if none of the variables had been defined.
If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalisation variables.
Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (for example, single- as opposed to multi-byte characters in arguments and input files).
Determine the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic messages written to standard error. and informative messages written to standard output.
Determine the location of message catalogues for the processing of LC_MESSAGES .

Default.

The standard output consists of informative messages about either: (1) each file processed, or; (2) each command line read from standard input.

If the standard input is not used, for each operand yielding a discrepancy, the output line has the following format:

" %s: %s\n", <pathname>, <unspecified string>

If standard input is used, a line of input is written before each of the preceding lines for files containing discrepancies:

"%s:\n", <input line>

Not used.

None.

None.

The 8-bit code returned by val is a disjunction of the possible errors, that is, it can be interpreted as a bit string where set bits are interpreted as follows:

0x80 = Missing file argument.
0x40 = Unknown or duplicate option.
0x20 = Corrupted SCCS file.
0x10 = Cannot open file or file not SCCS.
0x08 = SID is invalid or ambiguous.
0x04 = SID does not exist.
0x02 = %Y%, -y mismatch.
0x01 = %M%, -m mismatch.

Note that val can process two or more files on a given command line and can process multiple command lines (when reading the standard input). In these cases an aggregate code is returned: a logical OR of the codes generated for each command line and file processed.

Default.

Since the val exit status sets the 0x80 bit, shell applications checking $? cannot tell if it terminated due to a missing file argument or receipt of a signal.

In a directory with three SCCS files, s.x (of t type "text"), s.y and s.z (a corrupted file), the following command could produce the output shown:

val - <<EOF
-y source s.x
-m y s.y
s.z
EOF

-y source s.x

    s.x: %Y%, -y mismatch
s.z

    s.z: corrupted SCCS file

None.

admin(1) , delta(1) , get(1) , prs(1) .

February 1997 posix.fail