VAX-11 Record Management Services Reference Manual

This document serves as a comprehensive reference manual for the VAX-11 Record Management Services (RMS) within the VAX-VMS operating system. It aims to enable VAX-11 MACRO programmers to utilize RMS facilities and associated control routines, and to provide higher-level language programmers with an understanding of the record management interface.

The manual details the architecture and usage of key control blocks:

• File Access Block (FAB): Describes file-related information.
• Record Access Block (RAB): Defines record-related information and operations.
• Extended Attribute Blocks (XAB): Contains additional file attributes like date/time, protection, allocation, and key definitions.
• Name Block (NAM): Manages file specification information.

It outlines a suite of macro instructions and run-time operations for:

• File processing: Including creating, opening, closing, deleting, extending, and displaying file attributes.
• Record processing: Covering operations such as retrieving, storing, updating, deleting, finding, connecting/disconnecting record streams, flushing buffers, freeing records, rewinding, truncating, and handling multi-volume files.
• Block I/O: Performing low-level read and write operations directly with file blocks.
• File specification processing: Macros for entering, parsing, removing, renaming, and searching for files.

Additionally, the document covers run-time control block initialization, system-provided control routines (like those for rundown, default directory, and file protection), and provides appendices for completion status codes, file/record concepts, and file specification parsing syntax. The RMS supports various file organizations (sequential, relative, and indexed) and record access methods.