There are times when you need to know what the AUTO_ACTION environmental parameter on Alpha is defined. How would you find out?

First it's important to understand what the three options are for this parameter:

• HALT is clear; whenever the machine gets to the console prompt, it stays there until someone enters a command.

• BOOT indicates that after a power cycle or system crash, the system should boot up without writing a dump.

• RESTART indicates that when the power is switched on the system should attempt to write a crash dump to the dump file, and when complete the system will try to reboot itself automatically.

So how do you determine the value without powering down?

$ WRITE SYS$OUTPUT F$GETENV(“AUTO_ACTION”)