Sending keystrokes to DOS boxes??

Sending keystrokes to DOS boxes??

Post by Kevin Me » Fri, 24 May 1996 04:00:00



I was hoping that somebody could help with this problem that we are
having at work.

One of our applications is a DOS Foxpro 2.5 program running in a
Window  in WFW 3.11.   Management does not want to spend the time (and
money) bringing the application up to Windows just yet (get the cash,
forget about doing it right!!!).   Anyways the major brunt of this app
is to parse up flat files and append the data to archiving databases.
As you can guess after a few months these databases can get to be
quite large (approx. 500,000 recs).  So now we have to stop the
application periodically to zip these archiving databases and pack
them, if we don't stop the app we get sharing violations.  We want to
make a program to do this automatically.

The question is -->  Does anybody know how to send key strokes from a
Windows app into a DOS Window??  I know VC++,Borland and Fox and the
other programmers know VB so any suggestion in any language would be
great.  Any source or snippets would be fantastic.

I was thinking maybe stuffing the keyboard (?), we have done some
experimenting with OLE and DDE without much success. But we may be
doing it wrong.

I can be contacted by these newsgroups or Email below.

Kevin Meek              24 hours in a day; 24 beers in a case