You might give Win32::GuiTest a try. Among other things it can pass function keys to console windows in NT so maybe it can do what you want, though you don't mention what DOS-ish OS you're interested in, and it may well depend on how well-behaved your particular DOS application is. One warning: you want to be as specific as possible with the FindWindowLike() call or it will rifle through everything on your box, and take a long time doing it.

One way to run a DOS (note that NT's comand line isn't really DOS) program from Perl in NT is:

system('start progname.exe');
die "Couldn't start window\n" unless($? == 0);
[download]

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser