7.4.61. STREAM

Returns a string describing the state of, or the result of an operation upon, the character stream name. The result may depend on characteristics of the stream that you have specified in other uses of the STREAM function. (To understand the input and output functions, see Chapter 14, Input and Output Streams.) This function requests information on the state of an input or output stream or carries out some specific operation on the stream.

The first argument, name, specifies the stream to be accessed. The second argument can be one of the following strings that describe the action to be carried out. (Only the capitalized letter is needed; all characters following it are ignored.)

Command: an operation (specified by the stream_command given as the third argument) is applied to the selected input or output stream. The string that is returned depends on the command performed and can be a null string. The possible input strings for the stream_command argument are described later.
Description: returns any descriptive string associated with the current state of the specified stream. It is identical to the State operation, except that the returned string is followed by a colon and, if available, additional information about the ERROR or NOTREADY states.
State: returns a string that indicates the current state of the specified stream. This is the default operation.
The returned strings are as described in Stream class method state.

Note

The state (and operation) of an input or output stream is global to a Rexx program; it is not saved and restored across internal function and subroutine calls (including those calls that a CALL ON condition trap causes).