VMS Help Lexicals, F$PARSE, Examples  *Conan The Librarian (sorry for the slow response - running on an old VAX)

    1.$ SET DEF DISK2:[FIRST]
      $ SPEC = F$PARSE("JAMES.MAR","[ROOT]",,,"SYNTAX_ONLY")
      $ SHOW SYMBOL SPEC
        SPEC = "DISK2:[ROOT]JAMES.MAR;"

      In this example, the F$PARSE function returns the expanded
      file specification for the file JAMES.MAR. The example uses
      the SYNTAX_ONLY keyword to request that F$PARSE check the
      syntax, but should not verify that the [ROOT] directory exists
      on DISK2.

      The default device and directory are DISK2:[FIRST]. Because the
      directory name [ROOT] is specified as the default-spec argument
      in the assignment statement, it is used as the directory name
      in the output string. Note that the default device returned
      in the output string is DISK2, and the default version number
      for the file is null. You must place quotation marks (" ")
      around the arguments JAMES.MAR and ROOT because they are string
      literals.

      If you had not specified syntax-only parsing, and [ROOT] were
      not on DISK2, a null string would have been returned.

    2.$ SET DEFAULT DB1:[VARGO]
      $ SPEC = F$PARSE("INFO.COM",,,"DIRECTORY")
      $ SHOW SYMBOL SPEC
        SPEC = "[VARGO]"

      In this example the F$PARSE function returns the directory
      name of the file INFO.COM. Note that because the default-spec
      and related-spec arguments are omitted from the argument list,
      commas (,)  must be inserted in their place.

    3.$ SPEC= F$PARSE("DENVER::DB1:[PROD]RUN.DAT",,,"TYPE")
      $ SHOW SYMBOL SPEC
        SPEC = ".DAT"

      In this example, the F$PARSE function is used to parse a file
      specification containing a node name. The F$PARSE function
      returns the file type .DAT for the file RUN.DAT at the remote
      node DENVER.