dos console apps question

[dank at kegel.com]

Eric Pouech wrote:
> however, what you're facing right now is running a DOS program directly
> from the unix prompt (like wine mydospgm.com)
> in this case, there is no way for the parent process to tell something
> to its child, you it's up to you to do it by running the program with
> wineconsole mydospgm.com

In my favorie case, i.e. running programs like sed.exe or ss.exe
from the unix commandline, what you really want is for Wine to
just get out of the way, do no graphics whatsoever, not even do any X calls
at all, and run the bloody commandline program hooked up to the
existing unix stdin and stdout.

For instance, the Wine 20020509 that comes with redhat 7.3 seems to do about the
right thing when you run it on the sed.exe from http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/UnxUpdates.zip
It starts up quickly and processes input from stdin right away.
Running the same program in wineconsole takes forever (as it loads fonts
and creates a window) and doesn't work.

So wineconsole isn't the answer for any programs I run.

> (1): what's currently missing is a clean way to choose in wineconsole
> between the (well known) windows (GDI/USER) version and (not yet
> committed) (n)curse for display

I saw ncurses in a recent wine... it was horrible, there was no
way to turn it off.  I couldn't run any commandline programs
properly anymore.  Hopefully the work you're talking about
would make it easy to run programs which want neither GDI nor ncurses.

- Dan