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Top Forums UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers Tru64 Printing to something other than a printer Post 303017175 by Ken_Snauffer on Thursday 10th of May 2018 08:30:46 AM
Old 05-10-2018
Tru64 Printing to something other than a printer

I have been searching for a solution to a printing issue for several months now and have come up with no decently working solution. Please give input.

We have an old inventory control program running on TRU64 Unix V5.1B operating system. Around 2003 it was virtualized onto VMware via AVT's vtAlpha emulator. The program appears to have been written to print it's own internal events to two files (log_file and log_file1) which are then lpr'd to printers (control and logger) set up in the operating system via printcap and then the files are deleted. The printcap file showes these printers to be lp=@ip.address:9100 which are old HP print servers (lan to parrallel) with simple text only dot matrix printers attached.
These two printers print an average of about 3 single line entries per 1 minute, 98%+ of which is not needed. There is 1 print job (about 6 lines of text) submitted and printed every hour with an inventory update, which IS needed. Therefore, I cannot just redirect the printers to /dev/null.

We cannot just turn off the printers because the spooler then stops once it gets to about 100 entries and the program hults (but not the system). I say this because we can go in and purge the print queue (via lpc) and everything starts working again.

I did figure out that if we turn the spooler off, the log_file and log_file1 do not get deleted, but are instead appended to. The problem here is that 1 weeks worth of "held" printing ended up creating 1 log_file a little over 350KB and crashed the entire unix system because it filled up the minimal available disk space. We did have a backup of the VM, but this created about 8 hours of downtime till we cleaned up and updated the program's internal database.

A few things to mention...
1: There is a network obviously, but everything else is windows based.
2. There are no programmers that are willing to try to tackle re-writting the software (internal or external).
3. Everything that is "printed" is actually submitted to some sort of file and then that file is spooled to the printer (the log_file and log_file1 are just some of the files) then the files are deleted.
4. If these files exist, they are appened to and not over-written.

I am not sure what options I have, therefore I do not have specific quesitons on how to do something.
Can we change the printcap to print to a file or something else somewhere else?
Can we set up some sort of filter that only prints the information we want and just ignores the rest?
Are we just stuck and have to keep replacing print cartridges and paper regularly?
Is there anything else you would like to know to help you help me?

Thank you in advance.
 

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LPC(8)							      System Manager's Manual							    LPC(8)

NAME
lpc - line printer control program SYNOPSIS
/usr/sbin/lpc [ command [ argument ... ] ] DESCRIPTION
Lpc is used by the system administrator to control the operation of the line printer system. For each line printer configured in /etc/printcap, lpc may be used to: o disable or enable a printer, o disable or enable a printer's spooling queue, o rearrange the order of jobs in a spooling queue, o find the status of printers, and their associated spooling queues and printer dameons. Without any arguments, lpc will prompt for commands from the standard input. If arguments are supplied, lpc interprets the first argument as a command and the remaining arguments as parameters to the command. The standard input may be redirected causing lpc to read commands from file. Commands may be abreviated; the following is the list of recognized commands. ? [ command ... ] help [ command ... ] Print a short description of each command specified in the argument list, or, if no arguments are given, a list of the recognized commands. abort { all | printer ... } Terminate an active spooling daemon on the local host immediately and then disable printing (preventing new daemons from being started by lpr) for the specified printers. clean { all | printer ... } Remove any temporary files, data files, and control files that cannot be printed (i.e., do not form a complete printer job) from the specified printer queue(s) on the local machine. disable { all | printer ... } Turn the specified printer queues off. This prevents new printer jobs from being entered into the queue by lpr. down { all | printer } message ... Turn the specified printer queue off, disable printing and put message in the printer status file. The message doesn't need to be quoted, the remaining arguments are treated like echo(1). This is normally used to take a printer down and let others know why (lpq will indicate the printer is down and print the status message). enable { all | printer ... } Enable spooling on the local queue for the listed printers. This will allow lpr to put new jobs in the spool queue. exit quit Exit from lpc. restart { all | printer ... } Attempt to start a new printer daemon. This is useful when some abnormal condition causes the daemon to die unexpectedly leaving jobs in the queue. Lpq will report that there is no daemon present when this condition occurs. If the user is the super-user, try to abort the current daemon first (i.e., kill and restart a stuck daemon). start { all | printer ... } Enable printing and start a spooling daemon for the listed printers. status { all | printer ... } Display the status of daemons and queues on the local machine. stop { all | printer ... } Stop a spooling daemon after the current job completes and disable printing. topq printer [ jobnum ... ] [ user ... ] Place the jobs in the order listed at the top of the printer queue. up { all | printer ... } Enable everything and start a new printer daemon. Undoes the effects of down. FILES
/etc/printcap printer description file /usr/spool/* spool directories /usr/spool/*/lock lock file for queue control SEE ALSO
lpd(8), lpr(1), lpq(1), lprm(1), printcap(5) DIAGNOSTICS
?Ambiguous command abreviation matches more than one command ?Invalid command no match was found ?Privileged command command can be executed by root only 4.2 Berkeley Distribution November 1, 1996 LPC(8)
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