Many of you are I am sure familiar with Binkley or similar FIDO
mailers.  For those of you who are not, suffice to say that Bink is a mail
delivery program which sits in memory waiting for either mail bundles to
appear in its outbound directory, or for a call to come in from the modem. 
It then wakes up and transfers the mail as needed.  Obviously, no other
program can make use of the serial port while Bink is in charge.  However,
Binkley has available a multi-errorlevel exit routine which produces an
exit with certain errorlevels upon certain circumstances -  such as a
function key press.  For example, Bink exits with an errorlevel of 10 if F1
is pressed, 20 if F2 is pressed, 30 if F3 is pressed, etc.

        Now to the heart of the problem.  A typical batch file for use with
a mailer like Binkley follows:

   {at}echo off

   :Bink
   BTP Share Unattended

   Iff Errorlevel 150 Then
           BTP Share Mail
   ElseIff Errorlevel 100 Then
           pcplus
   Elseiff Errorlevel 90 Then
           aw
   ElseIff Errorlevel 80 Then
           call ppp.cmd
   ElseIff Errorlevel 70 Then
           term2
   ElseIff Errorlevel 10 Then
           goto Exit
   Endiff

   Goto Bink

   :Exit

        As you can see, Binkley (BTP) is running normally.  Pressing F10
causes Bink to exit with errorlevel 100, which then causes PCPlus to run. 
Pressing F9 causes PCAnywhere to run.  Pressing F8 runs the PPP dialer. 
Etc.

        Great!  So what's the problem?  The problem is, I (and some of my
clients) would like to have an EXTERNAL event cause Bink to exit with
errorlevel 80 (or whatever).  IOW, rather than opening up the Binkley
session, pressing F8, pressing  to get back to the
desktop, and continuing, we would like to simply start a process which
causes Bink to exit and then do our internet stuff, whatever it is. 
Exiting the internet dialer is a piece of cake.  I simply run a kill
routine which looks for PPP.EXE and kills it.  This done, the control is
passed back to the batch file, which then fires up Binkley again.  Running
a kill process on BTP.EXE will sure enough stop Bink and give control back
to the batch file, but the errorlevel cannot be controlled, AFAIK.  Is
there any way to EXTERNALLY force a process to close with a given
errorlevel?  I have a keyboard stuffer routine here which might do the job,
but it is extremely clumsy, and doesn't work very well, and in addition the
author wants *WAY* too much for registering the product.  Anyone have any
ideas?

                                                        Les

e-mail: lrhorer{at}fibrcom.com

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