Redirecting output to a printer

Redirecting output to a printer

[Jack Lunn]

How do you redirect output to a printer from within an Ada 
procedure (Unix and DOS environments)?

Creating an Out_File called "lpt1" seems to work in DOS.  I'm
just wondering if there is a better way.

Thanks for your help.

Re: Redirecting output to a printer

[Jacob Sparre Andersen]

Jack Lunn (jclunn@carol.net) wrote:
 __________
| How do you redirect output to a printer from within an Ada 
| procedure (Unix and DOS environments)?
|
| Creating an Out_File called "lpt1" seems to work in DOS.  I'm
| just wondering if there is a better way.
|__________

I will not claim that this is a better way, but it works (in Unix):

 - write the text to a temporary file
 - call the C system routine to print the file
   ('system ("lpr /tmp/print_it")' on a Unix box)

You will have to write a binding to the system routine, but that is not too
hard using the Interfaces.C and Interfaces.C.Strings packages.

Greetings,

Jacob
--
Jacob Sparre Andersen                            http://www.nbi.dk/%7Esparre/
Center for Chaos and Turbulence Studies          Phone: (+45) 39 65 53 51
The Niels Bohr Institute                                (+45) 35 32 53 05
--
"We need a plan to diverge from", Fesser

Re: Redirecting output to a printer

[John Apa]

Jack Lunn wrote:
> 
> How do you redirect output to a printer from within an Ada
> procedure (Unix and DOS environments)?
> 
> Creating an Out_File called "lpt1" seems to work in DOS.  I'm
> just wondering if there is a better way.
> 
> Thanks for your help.


On a unix machine I found that it's best to send output to a file in
/tmp and then when you're done creating it use a system call (I forget
the package/procedure name, but it's system dependent anyway) to fire it
off to the printer using whatever command line action you would normally
use. The function allows you to execute a command line from within your
program. It took a string like "p -o -l -s "\!*" <\!* | lpr
-Pps_lps_w14u". Worked pretty good.

Hope it helps.

-- 
***********************************
John Thomas Apa
Honeywell Defense Avionics Systems
Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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