VPIX compatability questions

[uunet!bria!mike]

In an article, Michael A. Shiels writes:
> Is there a way to detect you are running inside of VPix?

Yes, and it depends on what context.  If you're a DOS program and you
want to determine if you're in a VP/ix environment, just have that
program try to create a temporary file on the C: disk.  Since VP/ix
requires that pseudo-disk to be read-only (if you're going to boot from
it) then the create will succeed under real DOS, and fail under VP/ix.
You should, of course, check the error returned by DOS just to make sure
that it didn't fail because the disk was full.
If you're trying to detect if you're a UNIX process that has been created
by VP/ix, then you simply need to climb your process tree "backwards",
looking to see if your parent or grandparent was vpix.

-- 
Michael Stefanik, Systems Engineer (JOAT), Briareus Corporation
UUCP: ...!uunet!bria!mike
--
technoignorami (tek'no-ig'no-ram`i) a group of individuals that are constantly
found to be saying things like "Well, it works on my DOS machine ..."