Printing from the commanline

  • Thread starter Thread starter Werner Alexi
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Werner Alexi

Dear newsgroup,

in a highly automated environment there is a requirement to print text
files with extended error handling. So we are looking for a
commandline utility like PRINT with the following features:

1. The utility should come back to the prompt after the job has been
printed or failed to print.
2. The utility should return an error if the job was not printed
successfully.
3. The utility should not do any formatting, the text should simply be
passed through to the printer.

The old Netware NPRINT program did that. Unfortunately the Windows
PRINT program returns immediately as soon as the file is spooled, not
when it is actually printed. So an application using PRINT will not
know if the file printed or not.
Is there anything like that available as freeware, shareware or for a
reasonable price (less than US $ 100 or so)?

Kind regards
Werner Alexi
CS Software GmbH
(e-mail address removed)

Please remove nospam form the email address if you prefer to answer
directly!
 
What's wrong with copy to lpt? It does return an error if the operation
failed, so it's sorta useful in terms of "no printer" or the spooler service
was down, but not in "out of paper" (I assume). Isn't not spooling over that
printer an option? For 100$ you can get a cheap text printer and not spool
that (Windows settings).

Ndi
 
Dear ndi,

the situation we talk about happens in a large company. The data
actually comes from a host system and the host application needs to
know if it was printed, so all conditions like "printer offline", "out
of paper", "paper jam" etc. need to be understood and handled. There
are at least 25 printers involved (probably more). If the host sees
that a job was not printed, it can reschedule it at a later time and
issue an alarm. Host systems are managed (by people), so there is
someone taking care of the issue. Most Windows boxes (servers) just
happen to stand somewhere and not all events are taken care of
properly. So a "paper out" condition might go undetected on the
Windows server for a long time and if the host does not know about it,
we are in trouble.

Kind regards
Werner Alexi
 
Dear ndi,

the situation we talk about happens in a large company. The data
actually comes from a host system and the host application needs to
know if it was printed, so all conditions like "printer offline", "out
of paper", "paper jam" etc. need to be understood and handled. There
are at least 25 printers involved (probably more). If the host sees
that a job was not printed, it can reschedule it at a later time and
issue an alarm. Host systems are managed (by people), so there is
someone taking care of the issue. Most Windows boxes (servers) just
happen to stand somewhere and not all events are taken care of
properly. So a "paper out" condition might go undetected on the
Windows server for a long time and if the host does not know about it,
we are in trouble.

Kind regards
Werner Alexi
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure that our NT (5.0) server box, where our printers are
shared from, has no idea when a printer is out of paper or has a paper
jam. So I doubt that any client could possibly know that.

Didn't this issue get addressed when you planned your Netware->Windows
migration? Or was it a matter of Management -or worse, consultants-
deciding, unburdened by any comprehension of the consequences?
 
Werner said:
Dear ndi,

the situation we talk about happens in a large company. The data
actually comes from a host system and the host application needs to
know if it was printed, so all conditions like "printer offline", "out
of paper", "paper jam" etc. need to be understood and handled. There
are at least 25 printers involved (probably more). If the host sees
that a job was not printed, it can reschedule it at a later time and
issue an alarm. Host systems are managed (by people), so there is
someone taking care of the issue. Most Windows boxes (servers) just
happen to stand somewhere and not all events are taken care of
properly. So a "paper out" condition might go undetected on the
Windows server for a long time and if the host does not know about it,
we are in trouble.
Click to expand...
Hi

No easy way to handle this, especially not from the command line.

I suggest you consider buying some printer management tool so it is easy
for your host system managers to see/handle issues.

Take e.g. a look at the "Print Console" product here:

http://www.softwareshelf.com/
 
Dear newsgroup,
thank you for the help so far - what I get from it is:

The problem is solvable, so someone COULD write a commandline utility
that issues a print job and then monitors that job until it is gone or
the printer has a problem and reports back the status. So the question
is: DID someone write such a program and where can I get it? In the
worst case we might consider writing it ourselves, but this takes time
and resources (and we are not a Windows programming shop, so we might
need to learn a lot). Please understand that we are not responsible
for their migration from Netware, we simply deliver the tool which
sends the data from the host to the windows box and then starts
whatever utility they configure to print the job. We just want to help
them get their issue solved.
Introducing any kind of monitoring software which helps our customer
organize its Windows environment is way out of the scope of our
influence. Our job is to get the data from the host to the paper or
report an error back to the host.

Kind regards
Werner Alexi
 
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