Print to external programm

Kurt Pfeifle kpfeifle at danka.de
Sun Apr 23 09:56:09 PDT 2006


> Hi
>
> I have to use an external program to sent print requests to the
> printer, pu.
>
> Print requests should be accepted from the cups server, processed
> and sent to this program instead of a printer.
>
> Any idea how I can do this?
> Is there a backend I can use?

Are you, by any chance on SUSE? Or do you have access to a SUSE-10.0 box?

SUSE do ship a few additional backends (I believe the package name is "cups-backends"). One of them is "pipe". This one allows to directly pipe the arriving job files into another, external program. Use it like this in the Device-URI part of setting up a queue:

  'pipe:/path/to/external/command'

It is a Perl script, IIRC, and it should therefore be possible to just copy it to any other box. Or at least, it could serve you as an inspiration to write your own :-)

Note, that CUPS filters and backends follow their own conventions (number and order of parameters) for receiving and sending off data streams, therefore your receiving end should be aware of that (or you tailor it for the receiving end); see "man filter" and "man backend".

> Cheers, Tilo

Cheers,
Kurt




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