written by (???) (Extracted from wine/documentation/console) Consoles are just xterms created with the -Sxxn switch. A pty is opened and the master goes to the xterm side and the slave is held by the wine side. The console itself it turned into a few HANDLE32s and is set to the STD_*_HANDLES. It is possible to use the WriteFile and ReadFile commands to write to a win32 console. To accomplish this, all K32OBJs that support I/O have a read and write function pointer. So, WriteFile calls K32OBJ_WriteFile which calls the K32OBJ's write function pointer, which then finally calls write. [this paragraph is now out of date] If the command line console is to be inheirited or a process inherits its parent's console (-- can that happen???), the console is created at process init time via PROCESS_InheritConsole. The 0, 1, and 2 file descriptors are duped to be the STD_*_HANDLES in this case. Also in this case a flag is set to indicate that the console comes from the parent process or command line. If a process doesn't have a console at all, its pdb->console is set to NULL. This helps indicate when it is possible to create a new console (via AllocConsole). When FreeConsole is called, all handles that the process has open to the console are closed. Like most K32OBJs, if the console's refcount reaches zero, its K32OBJ destroy function is called. The destroy kills the xterm if one was open. Also like most k32 objects, we assume that (K32OBJ) header is the first field so the casting (from K32OBJ*to CONSOLE*) works correctly. FreeConsole is called on process exit (in ExitProcess) if pdb->console is not NULL. Console processes do not inherit their parent's handles. I think there needs to be two cases, one where they have to inherit the stdin / stdout / stderr from unix, and one where they have to inherit from another windows app. SetConsoleMode -- UNIX only has ICANON and various ECHOs to play around with for processing input. Win32 has line-at-a-time processing, character processing, and echo. I'm putting together an intermediate driver that will handle this (and hopefully won't be any more buggy then the NT4 console implementation). experimentation with NT4 yields that: WriteFile does not truncate file on 0 length write 0 length write or error on write changes numcharswritten to 0 0 length write returns TRUE works with console handles _lwrite does truncate/expand file at current position on 0 length write returns 0 on a zero length write works with console handles (typecasted) WriteConsole expects only console handles SetFilePointer returns -1 (err 6) when used with a console handle FreeConsole even when all the handles to it are freed, the win32 console stays visible, the only way I could find to free it was via the FreeConsole Is it possible to interrupt win32's FileWrite? I'm not sure. It may not be possible to interrupt any system calls. DOS consoles must be configured either on the command line or in a dot resource file (.console). A typical configuration consists of a string of driver keywords separated by plus ('+') signs. To change the configuration on the command-line, use the -console switch. For example: wine -console ncurses+xterm <application> Possible drivers: tty: Generic text-only support. Supports redirection. ncurses: Full-screen graphical support with color. xterm: Load a new window to display the console in. Also supports resizing windows. In the wine.conf file, you can create a section called [console] that contains configuration options that are respected by the assorted console drivers. Current Options: XtermProg=<program> Use this program instead of xterm. This eliminates the need for a recompile. See the table below for a comparison of various terminals. InitialRows=<number> Attempt to start all drivers with this number of rows. This causes xterms to be resized, for instance. This information is passed on the command-line with the -g switch. InitialColumns=<number> Attempt to start all drivers with this number of columns. This causes xterms to be resized, for instance. This information is passed on the command-line with the -g switch. TerminalType=<name> Tell any driver that is interested (ncurses) which termcap and/or terminfo type to use. The default is xterm which is appropiate for most uses. nxterm may give you better support if you use that terminal. This can also be changed to "linux" (or "console" on older systems) if you manage to hack the ability to write to the console into this driver. There are a large number of potential terminals that can be used with Wine, depending on what you are trying to do. Unfortunately, I am still looking for the "best" driver combination. 'slave' is required for use in Wine, currently. Program Color? Resizing? Slave? (linux console) Y N ? xterm N Y Y nxterm Y N Y rxvt Y ? N As X terminals typically use a 24x80 screen resolution rather than the typical 25x80 one, it is necessary to resize the screen to allow a DOS program to work full-screen. There is a wine.conf option to work around this in some cases but run-time resizing will be disabled.