Backup from within Postgres

Dear friends,
I have been searching the mailing lists for a couple of days now hoping to
find a solution to my problem. Well I hope I find a solution here. 

The problem is such:    I have a Win32 application that uses ODBC to connect to the Postgres (ver
6.5) on RedHat Linux dbase. I have been able to connect and perform a lot
of SQL statements, etc. However I am unable to perform the backup of the
dbase. I need to backup up the database from within this application. It
doesn't matter where the backup file is. I know there is a shell command
"pg_dump", yes it works fine from the shell but I need to backup the dbase
when connected to the Postgers database on an ODBC connection (I'm using
the 32-bit ODBC drivers for postgres).I have also tried making a function in the dbase and including the
"pg_dump" in that but to no avail. 

I would be grateful if there were any suggestions/advice/code to help me
with this task.

thanx a lot guys,
lloyd