HOST

In the syntax below, the square brackets must be included in the command syntax and do not indicate that that their contents are optional.

HOST COMMAND=['COMMAND'...]
     TIMELIMIT=SECS.

HOST executes one or more commands, each provided as a string in the required COMMAND subcommand, in the shell of the underlying operating system. PSPP runs each command in a separate shell process and waits for it to finish before running the next one. If a command fails (with a nonzero exit status, or because it is killed by a signal), then PSPP does not run any remaining commands.

PSPP provides /dev/null as the shell's standard input. If a process needs to read from stdin, redirect from a file or device, or use a pipe.

PSPP displays the shell's standard output and standard error as PSPP output. Redirect to a file or /dev/null or another device if this is not desired.

By default, PSPP waits as long as necessary for the series of commands to complete. Use the optional TIMELIMIT subcommand to limit the execution time to the specified number of seconds.

PSPP built for mingw does not support all the features of HOST.

PSPP rejects this command if the SAFER setting is active.

Example

The following example runs rsync to copy a file from a remote server to the local file data.txt, writing rsync's own output to rsync-log.txt. PSPP displays the command's error output, if any. If rsync needs to prompt the user (e.g. to obtain a password), the command fails. Only if the rsync succeeds, PSPP then runs the sha512sum command.

HOST COMMAND=['rsync remote:data.txt data.txt > rsync-log.txt'
              'sha512sum -c data.txt.sha512sum].