How to pass commands to MS-DOS through the front end by a button click

Question

Hi Friends I have developed the front end in a c# windows application. However I am playing a movie in command prompt i.e. (cmd.exe). Here i am able to view the entire data streams in command prompt i.e. how much part of the data is played? and how much data is remaining? and other things. Apart from this i am able to do various operations on it like pause stop and seek to a particular time using the keyboard. Now I want to control the command prompt from my front end which is an windows application i.e. I need to pass the commands by the button click like i want to pause stop and scroll the movie which is playing in the command prompt. I tried using various methods of c# like sendkey sendmessage etc but those are applied only to the active windows and whenever I click the button of my front end the command prompt becomes inactive and the front end becomes an active window so these methods are not applicable. Is there any method in c# wherein I will be able to generate the keyboard interrupt through software without actually pressing the keyboard? This is where I am stuck. The best example would be the on-screen keyboard wherein I can click on the button on the screen and it is passing the commands to the dos. The exactly similar kind of application I want to use where I am having the buttons on my front end and I want to send commands to the dos. Kindly reply soon as possible. Thank you prashant wamane

Sam Hobbs · Answer

cmd.exe is not DOS; it is the command processor. You can call it a command prompt window or a console window but it is not a DOS window. It (cmd.exe) does not execute DOS commands and it does not do graphics. I don't know what you mean by playing a movie. A cmd.exe window is incapable of showing graphics. Probably you are executing a console program that executes something else that creates a separate window to show the movie. There is probably a much easier way to do what you need to do. Beginners often think that the solution is easy by sending keys to a window but the details of doing that is often much more complicated than they realize. As you have discovered a command-prompt window is different from other types of windows. I get the impression however that the windows you are trying to send keys to is not a console window. Regardless I think there is insufficient information in this thread to be able to provide useful help. I hope I am wrong and that Manikavelu's suggestion helps.

prashant wamane · Answer

Thanx for ur reply dude. I'll try it now n get back to u

Manikavelu Velayutham · Answer

Here I am calling windows services programatically. Like this you can pass the dos command in the ProcessStart Info and the arguments in the next line as in below code. Surely it will work. ProcessStartInfo startInfo = new ProcessStartInfo ( sc.exe ); startInfo.Arguments = string .Format( CultureInfo .InvariantCulture start {0}   serviceName); startInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true ; startInfo.UseShellExecute = false ; using (System.Diagnostics. Process p = new System.Diagnostics. Process ()) { p.StartInfo = startInfo; if (p.Start()) { p.WaitForExit(); } }