Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!cogpsi!tom
From: tom@cogpsi.UUCP (Tom Vijlbrief)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Redirecting printer messages with lpd
Message-ID: <335@cogpsi.UUCP>
Date: 14 Jan 88 16:42:42 GMT
References: <11247@brl-adm.ARPA>
Reply-To: tom@rainbow.UUCP (Tom Vijlbrief)
Organization: TNO Institute for Perception, Soesterberg, The Netherlands
Lines: 35

In article <11247@brl-adm.ARPA> JON%UCLASTRO.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU writes:
>
>        We have a apple Laserwriter as the default printer on our local
>Sun network.  Error messages that get returned from the printer are
>placed in the error log file specified by lf= in /etc/printcap.  However,
>I would rather these messages either be sent directly to the user's
>terminal, or if not logged on, mailed to the user who initiated the
>job.  My conception of how this would work would be to tell the lpd
>deamon to send the messages to a filter instead of the file.  However,
>from the man pages for lpd, there does not seem to be a way of doing
>this.  Am I mistaken (as usual)?  If not mistaken, how would I go
>about doing this?  Presumably, lpd would need to be modified.  How

Because you are running SunOs you have named pipes.
You could create a named pipe and specify this pipe in the lf
entry.
A deamon program could read from the pipe and process the error
messages. The main problem is determining the name of the user who
prints. A possible solution would be to use a special filter
as the printing filter which saves the name of the user in a file.

(Probably this file will always contain the owner of the lpd deamon
in which case you have to replace the lpr program by a simple shell script)

Succes....

Tom

===============================================================================
Tom Vijlbrief
TNO Institute for Perception
P.O. Box 23				Phone: +31 34 63 14 44
3769 DE  Soesterberg			E-mail: cogpsi!tom@mcvax.cwi.nl
The Netherlands				    or:	uunet!mcvax!cogpsi!tom
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