As of K95 Version: 2.1
This File Last Updated: Sat Dec 7 11:55:24 2002
At some point a new edition of Using C-Kermit will be issued, incorporating the new material.
Then, each major C-Kermit platform (Unix, VMS, Windows, ...) has its own platform-specific manual. The manual for Kermit 95 is included with K95 itself, and is accessible from Kermit 95 by:
The Kermit 95 manual concentrates on the Dialer (how to graphically set up and launch connections) and the Terminal Emulator (terminal types, scrollback, key mapping, colors, local printing, character sets, etc).
In addition to the K95 manual, K95 also includes a great deal of other documentation, including the C-Kermit 7.0 and 8.0 manual supplements, linked to from the K95 manual. You can also find a brief tutorial for K95 HERE and another for C-Kermit HERE.
Those who purchased shrink-wrapped copies of K95 through version 1.1.17 received a printed copy of Using C-Kermit. Those who purchased shrinkwrapped copies of K95 1.1.20 received a PDF version of the book on CDROM. Kermit 95 2.1 should be ready for shrinkwrapped retail delivery in mid or late November 2002, and is always available by Internet download. Electronically delivered versions of K95 do not include the Using C-Kermit book because:
This is the primary reason that the cost of the electronically delivered version of K95 is so low. The shrinkwrapped version, when it is ready, will have a higher price.
TO COMPLICATE MATTERS... The Kermit 95 2.1 shrinkwrap, when it is available (late December 2002 / early January 2003), will NOT include the PDF version of Using C-Kermit; instead, it will be downloadable at no extra cost to all those who purchase the 2.1 shrinkwrap (this was the result of negotiations between the two different publishers involved, one of which has changed hands since the K95 1.1.20 shrinkwrap was published). It is expected that the PDF version of Using C-Kermit will also be available for purchase as an "e-book" from the publisher, Digital Press, or an authorized agent; the details are not yet available as of this writing (Nov 2002).
As for "Kermit"... This name was chosen on a whim back in 1981, before we had any idea that Kermit protocol or software would ever escape the bounds of Columbia University or remain current and popular for decades. The whim, in turn, was based on (a) a Muppets calandar on the wall when we were searching for a name, and (b) the fact that some of us had small children addicted to The Muppet Show. Although a name like "Kermit" might have certain drawbacks in today's fast-paced, high-powered software marketplace, it also has (we think) a certain charm and simplicity: It's easy to say, easy to spell, and utterly lacking in hyperbole and condescension. But if you prefer, feel free to refer to K95 as:
UltraHyperTurboOpenEnterpriseSmartSecureE-CommerceInternetPowerPro-2002 Gold
set bell audible ; Make sure Ctrl-G is audible set terminal margin-bell on 72 ; Margin bell like typewriter set terminal statusline off ; For scroll detection set terminal screen-update smooth ; Or "fast" - depends on screen reader set terminal screen-optimization on ; This is the default anyway set terminal mouse off ; Might be required by some readers
In addition, certain keys might need to be set to \Kignore, so they can be used as controls for the screen reader or Braille software. Depending on the specific screen reader, these might be the keys on the numeric keypad. The method for doing all this is illustrated in the ASAP.KSC file, for setting K95 up to be used with the ASAP screen reader.
For related resources, see our links page.
Kermit 95 2.1 is distributed as a full upgrade installation to those who have earlier K95 versions, no patching required.
Kermit 95 1.1.17 and later are distributed on CDROM. Version 1.1.16 was distributed only in patch form. Versions 1.1.15 and earlier were distributed on diskette. Since the last diskette release was in 1997, we've removed the longwinded discussion of problems with diskettes and diskette drives from the FAQ.
The Dialer is the graphical front end for Kermit 95. It is built using a portable GUI builder that creates versions for both Windows and OS/2.
The remaining .DAT files are associated with the GUI setup and registration programs.
If you use K95 to make different types of connections, not just TAPI, take the TAPI-related commands out of your K95CUSTOM.INI file.
The following command-line options can be used to tell K95 not to load certain DLLs; this can speed startup:
These numbers are powers of 2, representing single bits, and can be added to form a "bit mask" of options. Thus "-# 30" means don't load any of the above. On a 90 MHz PC, starting K95 1.1.16 with "-# 30" took about 1 second; without it about 4 seconds. You can omit the network DLLs if you will not be making network connections. You can omit TAPI if (a) you will not be making dialout connections, or (b) you will be using COM1 or COM2 directly rather than the TAPI modem device. You can omit Kerberos DLLs if you will not be making secure connections with Kerberos authentication. You can omit the XYZMODEM DLLs if you will not be transferring files with XMODEM, YMODEM, or ZMODEM.
It can take Windows 20-30 seconds to release the TAPI device if your modem is disconnected or powered off. When it is connected and turned on, it still can take 5-10 seconds. That's Windows, not Kermit, being slow. If you can use the SET PORT COMx / SET MODEM TYPE xxx interface instead of the TAPI one (which is possible only for standard COM ports, not Winmodems, etc), opening and closing of modems will be faster.
k95 scriptfilename arg1 arg2 arg3 ...
Specify the full pathname of K95 (or K95G) if it is not in the PATH. Specify the full pathname of the script file if it is not in the current directory.
In a shortcut to K95 or K95G you can put the script file name and arguments after the Kermit 95 executable in the Target box of the Shortcut properties.
In a shortcut to a Kermit 95 script file, you can put the arguments to the script after the script file name in the Target box of the Shortcut properties.
From the Kermit 95 prompt, or within a Kermit 95 script, you can use the TAKE command, followed by the script file name, followed by its arguments.
k95g oofa.ksc --xpos:500 --ypos:500 = "This is script arg 1" scriptarg2
http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/helper.ksc ftp://kermit.columbia.edu/kermit/scripts/ckermit/helper.ksc
@start /w /min "C:\Program Files\Kermit 95 2.1\k95.exe" scriptname = args...
k95 -# 96
You can use it to make any kind of connection that you could make from a regular window: Telnet, SSH, Dialout, FTP, etc, and you can transfer files over the connection in the normal way.
The only fly in the ointment is that your keystrokes are read by EMACS, not K95, and EMACS intercepts Alt keys, F keys, and all Control characters, and furthermore, doesn't pass your keystrokes to Kermit until after you press the Enter key, so command-line editing (e.g. Ctrl-U), completion (Esc or Tab), ?-help, etc, don't work as they do when K95 has "direct access" to the keyboard. Escaping back from CONNECT mode is a bit tricky too; you have to type:
Ctrl-Q Ctrl-] c CR
That's Ctrl-Q followed by Ctrl-Rightbracket, then the letter C, then press the Enter key. In fact, every control character is intercepted by EMACS, so to pass it through to Kermit you have to quote it with Ctrl-Q, and you probably also have to hit Enter afterwards.
And of course, when K95 is using stdio, there is no terminal emulation, so you can't (for example) run EMACS in your CONNECT session to the host :-)
But on the plus side, your CONNECT session is an EMACS buffer, so you can move around in it, edit it, etc, with regular EMACS commands.
You can also write a simple Kermit script that awaits and handles incoming calls, something like:
set port tapi
set speed 57600
set flow rts/cts
while true {
cd some-directory
answer 0
if success {
server
hangup
}
}
Obviously many variations and refinements are possible.
If you are using the K95 Dialer:
Then when placing a call, make sure:
If the phone number is not in portable format, neither Kermit nor TAPI will be able to apply any prefixes or suffixes, including the credit card number. (This process is referred to as "Phone number conversions" in the menus.)
To create a new TAPI Location that uses a Credit Card:
Now when you dial, these dialing rules -- including the calling card number -- will be used.
SET PORT LPT1
(or other parallel-port device). Only DOS names are allowed. Parallel ports (like Serial ports) are not automatically installed as TAPI devices since they are not modems. If you want a parallel port installed as TAPI device you must manually install it as a "Direct Serial Connection" device.
set host hostname port set modem type name ... dial phone-number
However, since the modem is at the other end of a Telnet connection, you would not normally be able to control its serial-port settings. But if the terminal server supports RFC2217 Telnet COM Port Control K95 can do everything it could do with a local PC COM port: set the serial port interface speed and flow control method, sense modem signals, control the DTR signal, send BREAK, etc.
One user reported trouble using NASI until they selected "use hardware flow control always" in the NASI Workstation Global Settings configuration dialog.
Kermit 95 does not include a direct CAPI interface.
set host /server * 3000
to tell K95 to wait for an incoming TCP/IP connection on port 3000 and then automatically enter server mode when the connection comes in.
If your Windows user ID is the same as your ID on the host you are Telneting to, you only need to supply your password on the host, since it already has your user ID.
However, if they are not the same, or if you want to ensure predictable behavior, e.g. in a script program, you can instruct K-95 not to send your user ID with the command:
set login userid
(without a user ID). Then the host will give its normal login: or Username: prompt. Put this command in your K95CUSTOM.INI file or your script file, depending on where/when you want it to apply.
set key \4385 \Kignore ; Gray Page Up set key \4386 \Kignore ; Gray Page Down set key \4388 \Kignore ; Gray Home set key \5409 \Kignore ; Ctrl Gray Page Up set key \5410 \Kignore ; Ctrl Gray Page Down
You can do this in the GUI version too, but that doesn't remove the scrollbar. However, it's harder to scroll back by accident with the mouse than it is to hit the wrong key by mistake.
In both the Console and GUI version, you can limit the scrollback capacity with:
set terminal scrollback number-of-lines ; (Terminal screen) set command scrollback number-of-lines ; (Command screen)
However, the minimum number of lines is 256.
<ESC>[2;1H<ESC>[J<ESC>[1;1H<ESC>[K
(replace <ESC> with an actual Esc character). What it does:
These forms of clearing do not enter anything into the scrollback buffer.
PCTERM Ctrl-CAPSLOCK to deactive.
(if your current emulation includes a status line). In any case, you can restore the keyboard to normal with another Ctrl-CapsLock or, in K95G, in the Actions menu.
Then specify the colors to be used to simulate the attribute:
Most IBM mainframe operating systems support "linemode" sessions, which are similar to hardcopy sessions -- no screen formatting. Unless your IBM mainframe has linemode disabled, you should be able to establish a regular Telnet session to it. You can transfer files between K95 and Kermit-370 over any of these kinds of connections.
Purchase the manuals from the current marketer of the terminal. Manuals are still being sold for all Wyse and DEC VT terminals. Note that (a) DEC sold off its terminal products division years ago, and it has probably changed hands several times since then, and (b) DEC is now owned by Compaq. DEC and Wyse terminal manuals tend to be quite expensive.
For further information, visit Richard Shuford's Video Terminal Information site.
Normally K95 refreshes the entire screen every 100 milliseconds, i.e. 10 times per second. This has proven to provide the best overall throughput, which is always a tradeoff between (a) responsiveness to keystrokes, and (b) speed of displaying large amounts of scrolling text. You can change the balance and the frequency with the command:
A smaller interval might produce snappier echoing, but probably at the expense of scrolling speed. SMOOTH forces screen refresh with every incoming character, and so turns the balance to totally favor fast echoing.
In version 1.1.16, K95's echoing strategy has been redesigned to give snappier echoing on modem connections, virtually eliminating any delay that can not be attributable to external causes. Echoing of a character from the local modem's command processor now takes less than 0.001 second, compared to about 0.110 second in 1.1.15.
Also, beginning in 1.1.16, screen updates are optimized. This results in noticeable speed improvements on most PCs, but paradoxically, slows down some others. To disable optimization, use:
SET TERMINAL SCREEN-OPTIMIZE OFF
Sometimes file transfers -- especially uploads of binary files -- fail using these settings. Such failures can almost always be fixed by restoring full control-character prefixing:
SET PREFIXING ALL
Or in the Dialer, edit the connection's File Transfer page. Change Performance to Custom, and change Control Char Prefixing to Never.
If that doesn't help, then give this command:
CAUTIOUS
If you still have problems, give this command:
ROBUST
(You can choose these on the Dialer's File Transfer page too).
If none of that helps, then consult Chapter 10 of Using C-Kermit, 2nd Edition: "Solving File Transfer Problems". And if that doesn't help, maybe K95's file-transfer partner has a defective Kermit implementation. Kermit 95 offers workarounds for most of the implementation bugs we know about in other products; click HERE and HERE for details.
/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQAAAQABAAD/2wBDAAIBAQEBAQIBAQECAgICAgQDAgICAgUEBAMEBgUGBgYF BgYGBwkIBgcJBwYGCAsICQoKCgoKBggLDAsKDAkKCgr/2wBDAQICAgICAgUDAwUKBwYHCgoKCgoK CgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgr/wAARCAQNBgADASIA AhEBAxEB/8QAHwAAAQUBAQEBAQEAAAAAAAAAAAECAwQFBgcICQoL/8QAtRAAAgEDAwIEAwUFBAQA
So how to view that snapshot that Aunt Hilda sent you? The labor-intensive method is to save the message in a separate file, edit out the base-64 encoded picture, save that to still another file, decode it into its original JPG, GIF, or BMP format into yet another file using the appropriate decoder, and then either put it on your own host-based website and (after setting the permissions appropriately) view it from your PC browser, or download it to your PC and tell K95 to "run start hilda.jpg" or whatever.
Here's an easier method, but one that's not quite as safe:
kermit -s xxx.eml (Substitute actual file name)
run start xxx.eml (Substitute actual file name)
This starts your Windows e-mail client (e.g. Outlook Express) with the mail message in it so you can see the picture(s). But again: be careful! If the message contained any enclosures other than pictures (such as Visual Basic scripts, Microsoft Word documents, HTML, ActiveX, etc), they could give your PC a virus, as explained in the Safe Computing document.
ssh add local-port 25 email.xyzcorp.com 25
in which email.xyzcorp.com should be replaced by the hostname of your own mail server, and 25 is the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP, i.e. mail server) Internet port. This sets up TCP port 25 on your PC to forward to port 25 on the e-mail host through the SSH tunnel.
Now SSH to your login host. In your mail program, set the SMTP server to "localhost". Then as long as you keep the SSH connection open, you can use your mail program in the usual way.
The same trick can be used for any other TCP service that might be blocked from normal access.
and on and on. And they desire this functionality to be packaged as a link library for this or that platform, a DLL, an OCX, a VBX, an Active X control, a Delphi component, a Netscape Plugin, a Java object, a Visual FoxPro object, etc etc etc. The combinations of functionality and interface are many, and there is no way we can satisfy them without warehouses full of programmers, which nobody can afford to pay for.
Consequently we recommend that software makers who wish to embed Kermit functionality in their products (communications, scripting, file transfer, terminal emulation, character-set translation, etc) license and use the programs we already have available. See the next item for an example.
The "API" (Application Program Interface) is the command language. It is more fully expressive, precise, comprehensive, and portable than any other API that could be designed (look at all the commands in C-Kermit or MS-DOS Kermit or Kermit 95; each one is there for a reason). As new releases of the Kermit program come out, your product can be easily updated and will benefit from all the new features, fixes, and speedups automatically.
The recommended method of embedding Kermit in another application is via command-line invocation. The Kermit command line can contain a selection of simple commands, and it can also refer to more complex command files or scripts composed by your application. Kermit can be configured to create any kind of log you need, and it can return the status of its operations in various ways that can be used by your application.
When you license Kermit software for embedding in your application, we are happy to work with you to ensure it meets your needs. And if Kermit protocol transfers are important to you, then it should also be important to you to come to the source -- we developed the protocol, we continue to improve it, we believe in it, and we stand behind it.
Following this advice allows each party to concentrate on what they are good at, rather than unnecessarily duplicating efforts and "reinventing the wheel". You concentrate on your application; we'll do the communications. We support our software, you support yours, everybody is happy.
As of October 2002, there is another possibliity available to programmers: Embedded Kermit. This is a Kermit module suitable for embedding. It's not a application, it's a "subroutine;" you have to integrate it into your application and provide all the communications and file i/o.
k95 update.ksc
The command file can be prefabricated, or it can be created dynamically by your application. If it is not in the current directory, of course you must specify the full path:
k95 d:\scripts\update.ksc
If you want K95 to exit automatically when the script is complete, put EXIT commands in the script wherever you want to return control to your VB program.
To invoke K95 from VB, use:
Shell (commandline, windowstyle)
where commandline is the command with which to invoke Kermit 95, such as "k95 update.ksc", and windowstyle is one of the following:
0 - Hidden 1 - Window has focus and is restored 2 - Window is an icon with focus 3 - Window is maximized with focus 4 - Window is restored, current window keeps focus 6 - Window is an icon, current window keeps focusThe Shell() function returns Kermit 95's task ID.
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