two questions about scripts

[Ethan M Greene]

Hello-

I am running PCGrADS v1.8SL11 on a MSWindows 2000 platform with Cygwin
1.5.12-1.

This weekend I had two problems while writing scripts.

First, I can use the absolute value function to display data, but not on
variables in scripts. For example, the code
              ‘d abs(var)’
works, but
              x = -5
              y = abs(-5)
generates,
              Function not found: abs
         Error occurred on line 2
              In file test.gs

Second, I would like to open files were the address is a variable that I
read in from a text file. The code,
  name = test.ctl
  ‘open ‘name
works fine, but
  dummy = read(‘filename.txt’)
                name = sublin(result,2)
  ‘open ‘name
does not work (even though ‘say name’ will output the correct address).

Any help would be most appreciated.

Ethan