Remote printing via uucp or other non-networked method

[Bradley T. Freese]

eravin at panix.uucp (Ed Ravin) writes:

> I would like print jobs on my RS-6000 running AIX 3003 to be routed to an
> arbitrary script that could call either UUCP, Kermit, or some other program
> to ship my files to a printer server.  Is there anyway to do this and still
> use system printer support (smit, printer queues, piobe, etc.)?

Yes, and you can select the degree of support.  To use the queuing system
(and therefore have queuing support and smit support), you need to put
appropriate queue and device stanzas in the file /etc/qconfig.  You can
either use smit to add a "queue" and a "queue device" or you can edit the
file directly.  The simplest stanzas would be something similar to:
    lp51:
            device = lp5
    lp5:
            backend = /bin/ksh /usr/bin/pb51

(Use at your own risk.)  In this example, the backend is *not* piobe,
but some user-written command/script that processes the file.  If you
want to use piobe, you can call it from within your command/script.

Some notes on the semantics of the "backend" keyword -- the name of
the spool file for the current job is passed to the backend as the
last parameter.  The queuing system does *not* pipe the spool file
into standard input for the command.  Furthermore, when the command
exits, the queuing system will erase the file.  Make sure you are
done with it!!!