  Purging a directory? 
 The Question is:
 
I have an application which produces more than 5000 files into a directory
daily.  I need to keep the number of files down to below 800. I can write
a program to do this but would like to know if there is a VMS feature I can
use to automatically keep the file count at 800 - thus avoiding any defevlopment effort.
 
 The Answer is:
 
  There is no mechanism to limit the number of files (save for the
  file version limit mechanism; see SET DIRECTORY/VERSION_LIMIT) and the
  PURGE mechanism, but creating a DCL script would take approximately as
  long as it has taken to compose a text answer for this question.
 
  Here is DCL code that performs roughly the requested task, though no
  deletion and no particular selection criteria (likely needed for most
  directory-processing applications) has been applied:
 
 
$ x = 0
$ limit = f$integer("''p1'")
$loop:
$ y = f$search("sys$login:*.*;*",1)
$ if y .eqs. "" then exit
$ if x .gt. 10
$ then
$    write sys$output "more than ''limit' files"
$    exit
$ endif
$ x = x + 1
$ goto loop
 
 
  The exact solution is left up to the reader.
 
