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From: davidsen@sungod.crd.ge.com (William Davidsen)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.xenix
Subject: Re: Writing serial device drivers
Keywords: serial ttys printers
Message-ID: <1461@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
Date: 2 Aug 89 18:50:22 GMT
References: <11929@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU>
Sender: news@crdgw1.crd.ge.com
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: General Electric Corp. R&D, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 13


  I can't think of any reason for a program to bypass the queue and
access the printer directly, and would not do it myself. However, why
not just create a FIFO in /dev which the ill-behaved programs can open
and write? Then you can have a daemon which reads the FOFI and write to
the printer, adding delays as needed (perhaps with nap()).

  If the applications do really nasty stuff like play with baud rate and
parity, you can't use this trick. You also might try a pty, which allows
setting the baud rate, but I don't know what it does...
	bill davidsen		(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM)
  {uunet | philabs}!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me