Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!lfcs!paul
From: paul@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Paul Anderson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Missing laser printer log output
Message-ID: <1599@etive.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 20 Mar 89 12:35:16 GMT
Sender: news@etive.ed.ac.uk
Reply-To: paul@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Paul Anderson)
Followup-To: <656@adobe.UUCP>
Organization: Laboratory for the Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh U
Lines: 32

In <656@adobe.UUCP>, Glenn Reid says that Transcript should write the
Output from the Laserwriter into in the printer Log file .....

>   TranScript should be writing that into /usr/adm/printer-log or
>   something similar.  I'm not sure of this, but it may be that your
>   real log file has the wrong protections, so the "daemon" process or
>   whatever it is that runs TranScript can't append the temporary file
>   onto the end of the log file.  I never even knew there was a
>   temporary file, and you certainly shouldn't *need* to read it,
>   although it sounds like you got it to work.

However .. when we upgraded to SunOS 4.0, lpd had changed. Under SunOS4.0
the "if" filter is no longer spawned with its stderr attached to the log file
specified in the printcap. Instead the output that you want goes into the
temporary file /usr/spool/printername/errsXXXX and is deleted as soon as the
job has printed! This is not documented anywhere that I can see (in fact the
Sun documentation still wrongly states that it goes to the log file). It may be
that there is some proper way of getting this information back, but Sun
support didn't seem to know. They were only able to confirm the existence
of the temporary file after examining the source for lpd.

Can anyone explain what happens to the contents of this file?

I hacked the transcript psif script to explicitly route its stderr to the
log file. This is only a script, so you don't need source to do that.



Paul Anderson                       JANET: paul@uk.ac.ed.lfcs
LFCS, Dept. of Computer Science     UUCP:  ..!mcvax!ukc!lfcs!paul	
University of Edinburgh             ARPA:  paul%lfcs.ed.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk
Edinburgh EH9 3JZ, UK.              Tel:   031-667-1081 Ext 2788