1 BULLETIN Invokes the PFC BULLETIN Utility. This utility is used for reading, adding and deleting message. Users are notified at login time that new messages have been added and the topics of those messages are displayed. Reading of those messages is optional. (Use the command SET READNEW while in BULLETIN for setting automatic reading.) Privileged users can add system bulletins that are displayed in full at login time. These messages are also saved, and can be read by BULLETIN. Messages are automatically deleted after a specified expiration date, or they can manually be deleted by either the submitter of the message or a privileged user. Format: BULLETIN BULLETIN has an interactive help available while using the utility. Type HELP after invoking the BULLETIN command. 2 Description The BULLETIN utility is a utility to display messages to users when logging in. Users are notified of messages only once. They're not forced into reading them every time they log in. Submitting and reading messages is easy to do via a utility similar to the VMS MAIL utility. Privileged users can create messages which are displayed in full. (known as SYSTEM messages). Non-privileged users may be able to create non-SYSTEM messages (unless your system manager has disabled the feature), but only topics are displayed at login. Folders can be created so that messages pertaining to a single topic can be placed together. Folders can be made private so that reading and writing is limited to only users or groups who are granted access. Alternatively, folders can be made semi-private in that everyone is allowed to read them but write access is limited. When new non-system messages are displayed, an optional feature which a user may enable will cause BULLETIN to ask whether the user wishes to read the new bulletins. The user can then read the messages (with the ability to write any of the messages to a file). A user can enable the notification and prompting of new messages feature on a folder per folder basis. However, the exception is messages submitted to the default GENERAL folder. Users are always notified at login of new bulletins in this folder, but can disable the prompting. This is to give non-privileged users some ability to force a notification of an important message. Messages have expiration dates and times, and are deleted automatically. Expiration dates and times can be specified in absolute or delta notation. Privileged users can specify "SHUTDOWN" messages, i.e. messages that get deleted after a system shutdown has occurred. "PERMANENT" messages can also be created which never expire. Privileged users can broadcast their message (to either all users or all terminals). A user can select, on a folder per folder basis, to have a message broadcast to their terminal immediately notifying them when a new message has been added. An optional "Bulletin Board" feature allows messages to be created by users of other systems connected via networks. A username can be assigned to a folder, and any mail sent to that user is converted to messages and stored in that folder. This feature originally was designed to duplicate the message board feature that exists on some Arpanet sites. However, with the addition of folders, another possible use is to assign an Arpanet mailing list to a folder. For example, one could have an INFOVAX folder associated with an INFOVAX username, and have INFO-VAX mail sent to INFOVAX. Users could then read the mailing list in that folder, rather than having INFO-VAX sent to each user. Optionally, the input for the bulletin board can be directed to be taken from any source other than VMS MAIL. This might be useful if incoming mail is stored in a different place other than VMS MAIL. Messages can be either sent to a file, to a print queue, or mailed to another user. 2 /EDIT Specifies that all ADD or REPLACE commands within BULLETIN will select the editor for inputting text. 2 /KEYPAD Specifies that keypad mode is to be set on, such that the keypad keys correspond to BULLETIN commands. 2 /PAGE /[NO]PAGE Specifies whether BULLETIN will stop outputting when it displays a full screen or not. /PAGE is the default. If /NOPAGE is specified, any output will continue until it finishes. This is useful if you have a terminal which can store several screenfuls of display in it's memory. 2 /STARTUP Starts up a detached process which will periodically check for expired messages, cleanup empty space in files, and convert BBOARD mail to messages. This is recommended to avoid delays when invoking BULLETIN. It will create a process with the name BULLCP. For clusters, this need be done only on one node. On all other nodes, the system logical name BULL_BULLCP should be defined (to anything) in order that BULLETIN is aware that it is running on another node. (On the local node where BULLCP is running, this logical name is automatically defined.) 2 /STOP Stops the BULLCP process without restarting a new one. (See /STARTUP for information on the BULLCP process.) 2 /SYSTEM /SYSTEM=[days] Displays system messages that have been recently added. The default is to show the messages that were added during the last 7 days. This can be modified by specifying the number of days as the parameter. This command is useful for easily redisplaying system messages that might have been missed upon logging in (or were broadcasted but were erased from the screen.)