For many developers or administrators, setting your attention-program to QSYS/QUSCMDLN can be very handy.

Using it in an application will make a “normal command line” simply appear on your screen when you call the API. You don’t need to create an input field; there won’t be anything that looks like a command line when your display file is active.

You would only have a new function key (<F9=Command line>) as one of your F-keys in your display file. The command line window would appear when your program called QSYS/QUSCMDLN after you received the <F9> signal.

As with any command processing API, be aware of how adopted authority is used in your program. You probably don’t want the authority of the owner of your program to be passed into the API.

You can see it work simply by running CALL QUSCMDLN from an existing command line. Or you can try it by having CALL QUSCMDLN in a small CL program and calling that program.

It’s not exactly what you asked for since no command line will show as part of your display file, but it can be an improvement in many cases.

Tom