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A-Shell Reference

(MBF_CMDLIN) If the command line starts with "SBX:", instead of treating it as an ordinary Windows command line, the specified SBX subroutine is called with the specified arguments.  The complete syntax is as follows:

SBX: sbxnam, arg1, arg2,...argN

Example

"SBX:EVTMSG,Hello World"

Notes

Other than the "SBX:", this is essentially equivalent to the XFUNC syntax, but unlike XFUNC, the return value of the SBX is ignored.

Do not include any extra spaces before or after the colon and comma delimiters.

All arguments will be passed to the specified SBX module as strings. For SBXs that expect numeric arguments, this is usually not a problem because the standard parameter conversion routine will convert strings to numbers, but there could be some SBXs that make decisions about the calling arguments based on the types passed. (EVTMSG happens to be one of them; if the first argument is numeric, it is treated as the event level, else it is treated as the message.)

The current state of A-Shell or ATE is suspended while waiting for the SBX to return, so it is probably only a good idea to use this with modal functions that are reasonably limited in scope. (Using it to launch an entire application, which in turn may get nested by subsequent launches is likely to burn up a lot of stack space; using the traditional CMD = "$ASHELL ..." to launch a new instance would be preferable in that case.