[en] On the basis of present knowledge of the weak decays of charmed mesons we build up inclusive lepton and kaon invariant decay distributions. These are used, in conjunction with the parent-child relation, to estimate the relative lepton and kaon signals arising from associated DD-bar production in hadronic collisions at large p/sub T/, assuming for the latter process an inverse power law p/sup -n//sub T/. Our results are presented as a function of n: for n = 8 we find a kaon yield some 20 times greater than that for an electron. e^+-K^+- coincidences are therefore suggested as a charm signal, with e^+-K^-+ to be used as a background subtraction. We discuss to what extent the measured correlation of the decay products eμ or eK can be used to retrieve those of the parent DD-bar. We derive a generalized Sternheimer relation for correlations and show how this can in principle be inverted by the use of the Mellin transform. In addition we propose a simple approximate inversion method which, for various typical functional forms, is shown to quantitatively reproduce the parent correlation