Microsoft KB Archive/65480

= Basic PDS 7.0, 7.1 Cannot Use IOCTL and Far Strings =

Article ID: 65480

Article Last Modified on 8/16/2005

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APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft BASIC Professional Development System 7.0
 * Microsoft BASIC Professional Development System 7.1

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This article was previously published under Q65480



SYMPTOMS
The IOCTL$ function and IOCTL statement do not work with far strings (BC /Fs) in Microsoft Basic Professional Development System (PDS) versions 7.0 and 7.1.



WORKAROUND
You can work around this problem by directly calling MS-DOS interrupt 21 hex, with function 44, to perform IOCTL communications.



STATUS
Microsoft has confirmed this to be a bug in Microsoft Basic PDS versions 7.0 and 7.1 for MS-DOS.



MORE INFORMATION
The IOCTL$ function and IOCTL statement allow Basic programs to interact with MS-DOS character device drivers that can give and receive control data strings. Not all character device drivers support IOCTL control data strings. For example, ANSI.SYS, which replaces the standard CON device driver in MS-DOS, is a character device driver, but it cannot receive or send control data strings.

Note that the IOCTL$ function and IOCTL statement cannot be used under MS OS/2. You can, however, make equivalent OS/2 API function calls to interact with OS/2 character device drivers.

