How to get eshell to do what I used to do with shell

["KARR, DAVID" <dk068x@att.com>]

I haven't gotten a reply from the Cygwin list yet on my shell ioctl problem.  I may get something useful from that, but I may have to consider an alternative path.  I wrote this little wrapper on "shell" a couple of decades ago, and it's worked fine since then.  I've briefly looked at "eshell", and it seems like it will do the job, but I wanted to know whether I can wrap it to do the same things my older wrapper was doing.

My old wrapper had these features:
* In a non-shell buffer, execing the main func would either create the first shell buffer, or go to the first one in the chain, perhaps called the 0th.
* In a shell buffer, execing the main func would create a new shell in the chain, using the current directory 
* In a shell buffer, execing the "goto-next-shell" func would move to the next buffer in the chain, or back to 0 if at the end
* In a shell buffer, execing the "find-shell-with-dir" func would take a string argument and find the next buffer in the chain where the pwd has that string as a substring

I think all of these are doable, but I haven't written any elisp for many years. I see that "default-directory" in each eshell buffer is set to the current directory, just like in the old shell package.  I wonder if this will work just by changing the name of the function to execute.  Could it be that simple?  I guess I'll iterate on that and come back here for question.