[cups] convert old printcap custom entries to cups help please

Jim Grotkowski JGrotkowski at skyplan.com
Tue Jun 6 11:05:27 PDT 2017


The company I work for uses old style lpr and printcap entries to perform customized printing of text files.
I need help in trying to transition the old customized printcap entries into a CUPS system.

In fact the original system designers used the lpr print system not as a hardcopy printer per se,  but as a text file queueing system for proprietary incoming streams of data.

The in-house printcap entries that worked with the incoming “text” data would send the data thru custom print filters and then spool the output to custom spool directories. From there, other processes/scripts would take the spooled text files for further processing, but because of the lpr queueing methodology, the processing from there-on occurred in a linear controlled fashion.

I would like someone’s help or direction to find the best way to invoke, in CUPS, the input filter and the spool directory as seen in the snippet below of our old printcap file.

----vvv—   old printcap entry    –vvv-----

# ALPHA GATEWAY - Inbound/Outbound Message Processor
#
alpha|ALPHA:\
        :if=/var/aldir/bin/prgs/alpha.scp:\
        :lf=/var/aldir/queue/alpha/lperrs:\
        :lp=/dev/null:\
        :af=\
        :as=\
        :ae=\
        :sd=/var/aldir/queue/alpha:\
        :sh:
#

Also please note that there are several other printers that I need to set up this way, each with their own filter and their own spooling directory. This means that the configuration that might be proposed needs to be applied to individual printers and not to system wide defaults.

Any help and or constructive comments will be much appreciated.

Regards,
Jimgrot



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