Re: a2ps: Printer "display" not working

[Heinrich Rebehn <rebehn@ant.uni-bremen.de>]

Almut Behrens wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 11:56:18AM +0200, Heinrich Rebehn wrote:
>
> > "a2ps -P display .bashrc" yields:
> >
> > [.bashrc (plain): 2 pages on 2 sheets]
> > sh: line 1: /tmp/a2_HSzrDm: Permission denied
> > [Total: 2 pages on 2 sheets] sent to the printer `display'
> > [2 lines wrapped]
> >
> > Using strace i found:
> >
> > [pid  8415] open("/tmp/a2_N4Fh2p", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC|O_LARGEFILE, 
> > 0666) = 3
> >
> > and a bit later:
> >
> > [pid  8416] execve("/tmp/a2_N4Fh2p", ["/tmp/a2_N4Fh2p"], [/* 25 vars 
> > */]) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
>
>
> Just an idea:  maybe you have a seperate partition for /tmp, which is
> mounted "noexec" (as a security measure).  If so, you might want to try
> remounting it "exec" temporarily
>
> # mount -o remount,exec /tmp
>
> If that should solve the problem with a2ps, you could try to
>
> * file a bug report
>
> * set TMPDIR to some other directory where you have execute permission
> before you run a2ps. -- Not sure what technique a2ps uses to create
> tempfiles (there are quite a few...) -- at least some of them honor the
> setting of the environment variable TMPDIR...
>
> * have /tmp be mounted executable, permanently (in fstab)
>
> Good luck,
> Almut
Thanks for your reply, Almut

i already checked the mount options for /tmp and played with TMPDIR (i 
should have mentioned that in my mail :-)).

I then compared with my system at home where a2ps is working. strace 
there gives:

[pid  5604] execve("/usr/bin/gv", ["gv", "/tmp/a2_0T7bPF"], [/* 23 vars 
*/]) = 0

On the faulty system i get:

[pid  8416] execve("/tmp/a2_N4Fh2p", ["/tmp/a2_N4Fh2p"], [/* 25 vars
>>*/]) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)

The first parameter (gv) is missing. A further look at /etc/a2ps.cfg 
revealed that i had inadvertently commented out the

Variable: ghostview gv

line. After removing the comment, a2ps works fine!!!

Regards,

	Heinrich