customizing printcap to email file

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 3:33 PM -0500 4/3/03, David Banning wrote:
>what I would like to do is have windows boxes print to a unix
>printer filter which would convert the file into pdf format
>and put the file into a directory where it could be emailed
>out.  
>
>Anyone tried this? First off, I tried modifying the printcap
>if= entry to take the file and save it as a file. That was a
>no go - I just got an error.

This is should be workable, although there are probably a number
of subtle details that you'll need to pay attention to.  You
will probably want to set a log file (lf=) for the printer, as
some useful error messages might show up there.  Other errors
show up in /var/log/messages or /var/log/lpd-errs.  What error
did you get?

Note that you'd want to set if= to an executable script, and
that the script should just *read* from stdin and write to
where you want it written.  Eg:

    #!/bin/sh
    cat > /tmp/somefile

First try to get it to work by writing to a /tmp file.  If you
get that working, you can then move on to getting it to work
more like what you really want.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu