>I am interested in using the 5 input printer status lines to read a special device. Then I would like to send a command out of the data lines to this device. does anyone know the commands in vfp6.
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There isn't one; you need a special type of device driver, called a port monitor, to handle this task directly, and VFP by itself does not offer this capability. The necessary functions cannot be written using just VFP as a programming language; there are third party add-ons such as Robert Abrams' offering (an evaluation copy is available here on UT, and a commercial version of it is available from his web site) - the alternative really calls for writing code in a language like C++ and making use of the Windows DDK ( a set of services that provide direct control of low-level ports, mostly used for writing device drivers) to get the necessary access to the low-level hardware.