OpenVMS to HP-UX migration

[gstatton]

Not sure if this is the best place to find any information, but i was told we need to move off of our ALPHA running VMS and move to UNIX (HP-UX 11i). We have a bunch of VMS COM scripts which would need conversions. Instead of rewritting them all, i was told to develop a conversion tool of sorts. Being such a daughting task, i was wondering if anyone out there has delt with a similar issue, and knows of a good aproach to this. I've started to write something in SED/AWK, but i feel like we are going to have to go over them again anyway and fix up EVERYTHING. Does anyone know of a UNIX script (PERL maybe?) which can at least take a chunch of this work? If this is not the place to post this, let me know...

thanks...

 

[MikeLacey]

gstatton hi,

I had a look on

http://www.cpan.org

but didn't come up with anything after a short search.

I had to do something similar moving a database and some scripts from UNIX to NT a while ago. The UNIX scripts generated and ran SQL and the idea was to translate them to use Perl and The DBI.

I scratched my head for some time trying to write a conversion utility but didn't succeed. I ended up re-writing the scripts that were actually in use and not bothering with the stuff I was just keeping around for a rainy day.

My problems were:

First - I'm a rubbish programmer

Second - The output from my scripts was (sometimes) legal Perl but was pretty unreadable/unmaintainable. There are a couple of conversion utilities that come with Perl and they suffer from the same problem as well.

Third - The generated Perl scripts didn't always do what I wanted them to (please see "First" above) hardly ever in fact. Writing a reliable translation utility is a non-trivial task and you'll need to test each translated script carefully.

I had twenty something scripts to convert in the end, though my initial estimate was over two hundred - it might well be worth looking at the scripts you have and asking how many really need to be converted.

This rather long reply could be summarised in three words:

Don't do it.

Mike

"Deliver me from the bane of civilised life; teddy bear envy."

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