UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi there,

I want to open a cash drawer remotely. The cash drawer is commanded by a printer.

I need to connect to the cash drawer which is connected over a network (and shared) and simply send a sequence of five ASCII commands (see http://pages.prodigy.net/daleharris/popopen2.htm) to a printer, for the cash drawer to open.

This is the sequence as indicated by the drawer opening website: 27,112,48,55,121

The printer computer uses a Windows system, and it's shared as: \\KASSI1\Skuffa where KASSI1 is the computer name on the network and Skuffa is the printer name.

Please tell me if you need any more information to help me on this. I've tried the "lpr" command but it seems I didn't get it to work somehow, probably because of an error in my syntax. I haven't found any examples of UNIX-to-Windows raw network printing, and I really hope some of you wizards have some suggestions for me.

Thanks a lot in advance,
Friðrik

27,112,48,55,121 contains an 8, so I'm guesssing it's decimal. In octal that would be 033, 0160, 060, 067, 0171. That makes sense because now it is an esacpe sequence: ESC, p, 0, 7, y. You need to look at your echo command because the syntax depends on the shell and the system. But for me...this should work:

echo '\033p07y' | lpr
This sends a newline character after the escape sequence which is probaby needed.

Thanks Perderabo - that makes a lot of sense.

What does not make sense to me is how to use the "lpr" command with a network. I've tried multiple variations, such as:

echo '\033p07y' | lpr -P\\KASSI1\Skuffa

I constantly get:
lpr: error - unable to print file: client-error-not-found

So what am I doing wrong?

Okay, here's a little update. I was playing around and decided to actually set the printer up using Mac's little GUI. I set it up as a Generic PostScript printer, called it Skuffa, and then ran:

echo '\033p07y' | lpr -P Skuffa

It, for the first time, worked! I was happy, until I found out that it had printed meters of some code, starting with the line "%!PS-Adobe-3.0".

Now, I don't want that to happen again. I think my problem was making the printer into a Generic PostScript printer instead of just a Generic one.

Are there any other tips you'd like me to consider about this command before I try this again?

(the register that this is connected to is actually being used at the moment, but I'd really like to finish this functionality today)

Sorry, I don't know how to set up printers on a mac.

Solved.

The problem was not anything about the printer setup. I wasn't using the -oraw parameter (which makes it a raw command). This is the solution then:

Open drawer: echo -e "\033\160\060\067\171" | lpr -P Skuffa -oraw
Receipt cutter: echo -e "\033\155" | lpr -P Skuffa -oraw

Thank you for your help.