NCL Statement Types and Syntax › Comments in NCL Procedures › Suppression Character

Previous Topic: Non-displayable Stand-alone Comment Lines

Next Topic: Label Statements

Suppression Character

The minus character (-) is reserved as the suppression character. If used, the suppression character (-) must be the first non-blank character in the line. The suppression character can be used with both command and comment lines, but not NCL statement lines. When used in a command line, the command is executed in the normal way. However, the command is neither displayed (echoed) on your screen before execution, as would normally be the case, nor written to the system's activity log.

Example: Suppression Character

This example shows how to use the suppression character when entering commands from an OCS window.

-SHOW USERS

Results generated by the execution of the command are displayed at your terminal and are written to the activity log.

An alternative to using the suppression character is the &CONTROL NOCMD statement. This statement prevents the echoing of all commands within the procedure until the end of the procedure or until and &CONTROL CMD statement. When using NOCMD, the results generated by commands are written to the activity log.

Use of &CONTROL NOCMD has no impact on comment lines and does not cause them to be suppressed.