Hello Paul!

12 Dec 94, Jonathan de Boyne Pollard writes to Paul Goedicke:

 ZZ>>
 >> I'm trying to pass the command string
"[F10]" to
 >> a DOS communications program that must be shut down properly.
 ZZ>>

 JdBP>   The best that you could probably do is somehow trigger off a TSR in
 JdBP>   that session that primes the BIOS keyboard buffer, a la KEYSTACK.

 JdBP>   I cannot off hand think of a means whereby you could trigger the TSR
 JdBP>   from *outside* the VDM, though, since VDMs don't have APIs for most of
 JdBP>   the OS/2 IPC primitives, such as semaphores or queues, and a TSR
 JdBP>   wouldn't be much use if it blocked the whole session on a read of a
 JdBP>   named pipe.

This isn't quite right.  There is support for named pipes *and* semaphores
in a VDM.  How official it is, is another matter.

However, if you look in Ralf Brown's interrupt list (the one I have is
version 41), the way in which you can access semaphores is listed.  It is
not very well documented in the interrupt list, but maybe using this
information and the Control Program Guide, you should be able to set up a
named event semaphore which you can then poll from a TSR.  I'm working on
how to do this (well, I was
bored!).

It won't be a very nice way of getting the job done (stuffing values into the
keyboard buffer is certainly not very elegant), but it should be sufficient
to solve your problem without degrading performance.

Oh, btw, the semaphore API is interrupt 21h, function 64h.  The API is
listed in INTERRUP.E which is file 'B' (i.e. INTER41B.ZIP).

Hope this helps somewhat,

Richard.

--- GoldED 2.40