Re: printing to a windows printer

[Philipp Lehman <lehman@gmx.net>]

On Mon, 2 Oct 2000, David Erdman <david@erdius.net> wrote:

>sorry, i am pretty new in linux....i understand the lock part (i think), but 
>how would someone create a trash bin dedicated to lpd?

Create a character special file with major number 1 and minor
number 3, like that:

	mknod /dev/lpnull c 1 3

The name 'lpnull' is arbitrary, choose whatever you like. Hint:
if you do a 'ls -l /dev', you'll see that for character and
block specials, ls reports the major and minor numbers instead of
the file size. For /dev/null, the output looks like that:

#ls -l /dev/null
crw-rw-rw-    1 root     root       1,   3 Sep  1 11:03 /dev/null
                                   ^^^  ^^^
                                 major  minor

>should I just comment the /dev/null out then?

No, simply change it to

	:lp=/dev/lpnull:

The whole point is to prevent that /dev/null gets looked, but you
do want to discard any output with a setup like this---ie. the
print job is piped to a magicfilter script which then pipes it
to the printer so that under normal conditions nothing should
ever end up at /dev/lpnull. If it does, somthing is wrong and you
don't want the failed print job to end up on your harddrive.

BTW: I've seem another post of yours concerning the setup of a
LaserJet 4L:

>Oct  3 19:29:10 ganymede lpd[969]: cannot execv
>/var/spool/lpd/lp0/filter
>Oct  3 19:29:10 ganymede lpd[968]: lp0: job could not be printed 

Did you check the permissions of /var/spool/lpd/lp0/filter? Is it
executable?

-- 
Philipp Lehman <lehman@gmx.net>