Win32 Perl Programming: The Standard Extensions, Second Edition

Console Windows

Win32 platforms support the concept of a console. Every Win32 Perl programmer is familiar with it; he just might not be aware of his familiarity. A console is a chunk of memory reserved by Win32 (called a console buffer) that is bound to a window that displays the contents of the buffer. A program can fill this chunk of memory with characters (and can specify the color of the characters). An application binds a console buffer to the console you see as the output text window of the program. When Perl executes a print command and you see the results on your screen, you are really seeing the output being sent to a console buffer and displayed by the console window. Consoles are created by requesting the Win32 OS to allocate one. ...