Character Device Driver

It is a category of the Physical device drivers. A OS/2 Character Device Driver accesses data character oriented, often bytes or streams. Usually these drivers access data sequentially e.g. I/O for special hardware chips, like programmable I/O circuits.

OS/2 assigns names for these drivers e.g. MOUSE$ or LPT1. The driver may support more than one device with the same driver.

A character DD may be replaced by an other one with the same name (it depends on the loading sequence). This means, that such a driver needs to have a mechanism to unload.