The commands recognized by ADBM and BADB are composed of a command name followed by one or more parameters. You can specify these parameters in any order, but you must separate them by spaces or commas. You can include more than one command per line, separated by one or more spaces.

Commands Spanning Multiple Lines

You can specify a command that spans multiple lines by inserting a space and a backslash (\) as continuation characters at the end of each line prior to the last line. Any characters you specify after a space and a backslash are ignored.

Quoted Strings Spanning Multiple Lines

You can specify a quoted string that spans multiple lines; however, you must enclose all string segments in quotes and you cannot split a string between the two backslashes each used to designate masking (see 2.10.1) or action substitution (see Section 3).

Example

 "This is the first part of the string " \ 
 "you cannot break the string between ->\_TOKEN3\<- the back 
  slashes '\\' " \  "the last part of the string"

Abbreviating Commands

In general, you can abbreviate most command names and parameter names to their first 3 characters. The following are exceptions:

Case Sensitivity of Commands

Although you can specify the command names themselves in uppercase or lowercase, the strings you specify are case sensitive if you select the case sensitive option when creating the run-time version of the database. See Section 6.

Inserting Comments

You can insert a comment anywhere a space is valid. You cannot insert a comment within a quoted string or within a delimiter set.

Comments begin with /* and end with */, as in the following example:

/* This is a comment */

For comments that span more than one line, precede the start of the comment on the first line with /* and follow the end of the comment with */ on the last line.

Comments are not saved in the run-time autoaction database and subsequently do not appear if you process the autoaction database with DADB. See Section 6.