Hacking the SYSV Spooler.

[Russell Brown]

This question only refers to SYS V - Berklyites should press n :-)

Please correct me if I am wrong (sure someone will :-) but I can't find
any simple way to support different types of stationary under the
System V spooler.

What's needed is some mechanism whereby jobs can send output to the
spooler indicating the required stationary (letterhead, narrow plain,
wide plain, multipart, pretty paper with flowers on etc etc)

The spooler beasty should only print those jobs that match the
currently loaded paper type, holding all other jobs in the queue until
the system admin changes the paper (and tells the spooler!).

To make this workable, a number of tools will be required to
interrogate the queues, tell the spooler we are about to change the
paper and detect that the spooler has stopped output.

Anyone have any ideas on how to achieve this? is hacking an interface
program the correct approach? The file formats in /usr/spool/lp are
not documented :-( and we do not have source :-( :-(

Comments? Ideas? Email and I will summarise if an interest is shown.

Thanks in advance,
	Russell

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