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read-me: Simultaneous Peripheral Operation OLine
*** This is version 1.2 of the SPOOL system, updated December 25th, 1986!!! *
This is the documentation to the SPOOL system described in Ami Project
Magazine, Volume 1, issue #5. For more complete information on how it works,
rush on down to your nearest purveyor of high-quality Amiga publications.
DISTRIBUTION: Copyright (C) 1986, by Tim Holloway. This system may be freely
distributed for non-commercial use by any means, as long as this and all
other copyright notices are not removed. These rights may not be abridged
or modified in any way except by written permission of the author.
DESCRIPTION: The SPOOL system consists of 3 programs: A queue manager,
a printer driver, and a SPOOL request program. The queue manager can
driver multiple printers simultaneously, however present versions of
AmigaDOS only support one system printer, so other printers would have
to be driven as non-ANSI devices (unless they're ANSI printers!). To
actually run the system, you need programs SPOOL, SPOOLER, and PRTSPOOL,
as well as the SPOOL.go startup file. To start SPOOLING, execute SPOOL.go.
Try the AmigaDOS STATUS command and see what happens. Whenever you wish to
print a file or files, use the command:
SPOOL file1 [file2] [file3] [...]
The names of the files will be placed in a queue. As soon as a printer
becomes idle, it will request another filename, open the file, and print
it. The only limit to the queue size is available memory. To flush
the queues and stop SPOOLing:
SPOOL -shutdown
There is at present no provision to interrupt a print request in progress.
Type carefully, then - SPOOLing a non-text file could be messy - the only
way to abort an unwanted request is to deselect the printer, finish any
other tasks in the system and reboot (so what did you expect, for free?).
BUGS: There's always one more, so they say. This version corrects a bug
in the original Ami Project article where the memory occupied by queued
filenames was not released. There's probably more, especially since logic
was modified so that PRTSPOOL and SPOOLER do all their talking through
Intuition rather than stdout and stderr. The "dates.c" file should provide
laughs for years, particularly at the end of February. Any and all help
with this function will be VERY gratefully accepted.
MORE BUGS: Using earlier versions of this system, PRTSPOOL was prone to
refuse to print perfectly legitimate files, saying that they weren't found.
That's because the search for files whose higher-level directories were
not explicitly given was mad based on PRTSPOOL's current directory, rather
than SPOOL's. SPOOL now calls ExpandPath to get the true pathname.
N.B.: The pathname.c, gripe.c and dates.c files are general-purpose functions
which you can use in any programs you see fit. Permission is granted to
include them into commercial programs as well.
The SPOOL system demonstrates the power of the Amiga's mutitasking abilities
in a very practical way. It makes extensive use of Amiga Exec's message
passing facilities and list-handling primitives, and is extremely flexible,
both in its present form and in the ease in which it may be extended to
provide all the functionality of a minicomputer or even mainframe SPOOLing
system on a "home" computer. Hopefully, you will find this system useful
and even inspirational (let me know what kinds of improvements you come up
with).
Tim Holloway
CIS 73026,2026
BIX tholloway
And always,
Casa Mi AMiga: Fidonet 112/1 (904) 733-4515
Enjoy!