THE CUPS BACKEND PSOCKET

Description

This backend has been developed to accomplish the following two main goals:

• to dump he final output to the printer to a file for manual inspection,
• to process the final output by a program possibly residing on a different host.

The system consists of three components:

• the backend program, psocket, itself,
• the service progfam, printerdump, on the target host.
• a (set of) configuration file(s) which depend on the operating system of the target machine.

The device uri

is very similar to the default device uri syntax of the standard socket display with the extension of an optional command to postprocess the printer output:

psocket://targethost:socketnumber/?command

If no command is specified, the printer output is saved to a file

/var/tmp/printerxxxx.tmp

where xxxx is the PID of the service program on the target host.

Principle of operation

The backend psocket establishes a socket connection to an inetd compatible service on the target host; the serice program used is the script printerdump.