Interacting with the Operating System

Since SIC was designed to be portable on various operating systems (Unix, Mac-OS, MS-Windows, and in the past the defunct VMS), interaction with the operating system is normally kept to a minimum.

However, many operations eventually deal with files handled by the operating system. To avoid platform dependencies, SIC allows some basic file operations through the SIC command.

When control is desired at the operating system level, the command SYSTEM can be used to access it without loosing the SIC context. For user convenience, SIC also accepts the short-cut

        $ operating_system command

instead of the more conventional SIC-like syntax

        SYSTEM "operating_system command"