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From: hobbes@caen.engin.umich.edu (Steven J  Mattson  )
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: Printing and bitbuckets
Summary: Copy /dev/null
Keywords: printing
Message-ID: <1991Feb20.183050.23477@engin.umich.edu>
Date: 20 Feb 91 18:30:50 GMT
References: <1991Feb20.032249.29595@dbsm.oz.au>
Sender: news@engin.umich.edu (CAEN Netnews)
Organization: University of Michigan Engineering, Ann Arbor
Lines: 27

In article <1991Feb20.032249.29595@dbsm.oz.au> maf@dbsm.oz.au (Martin Foord) writes:
>A problem occurs  when  people  try  and
>print on more than one printer, and therefore all printers try to get access to
>/dev/null, and so the first come gets first served. Therefore,  if  someone  is
>printing  a  *huge*  job  on one printer off the annex then and some other user
>trys to print on another printer, the new user must wait for the  huge  job  to
>finish  (ie: until they free the lock on /dev/null). 

Make a copy of /dev/null for each printer, and change the lp entry to point
to the copy. Ex:

# ls -l /dev/null
crw-rw-rw-  1 root       3,   2 Feb 20 11:21 /dev/null
# mknod /dev/null-aprint1 c 3 2
# chmod 666 /dev/null-aprint1
# ls -l /dev/null*
crw-rw-rw-  1 root       3,   2 Feb 20 11:21 /dev/null
crw-rw-rw-  1 root       3,   2 Feb 20 13:11 /dev/null-aprint1
#

Some folks prefer to name these /dev/lp-<name>, or group them all
in a /dev/lp directory as well for clarity.

 -Steve Mattson
  Computer Aided Engineering Network
  University of Michigan
  hobbes@caen.engin.umich.edu