Port Redirection in Fedora

[R. G. Newbury]

R. G. Newbury wrote:
 > > Well that's part of the idea. I have a DOS program (accounting) 
which can only
 > > write out to LPT1, LPT2 or to a file. The latter is a pain. I used 
to use
 > > redirection to divert the output which the program thought it was 
sending to
 > > LPT2, to a networked printer.
 > > I'm looking for something to do the same thing under Fedora 5.

Three things:

 >How are you running this DOS program under Linux? Have you re-compiled,
or are you using something like dosemu, qemu, or wine? As if it's the
latter, you may be able to set LPT1 in the configuration file.

I have been running it under dosbox. The accounting program (which I 
have been using since 1987) is a pure DOS program.
Unfortunately, dosbox does not know anything about printer ports.
Wine does not do DOS programs...
I have been completely unable to get dosemu to install and run...the 
'freedos' hd image install never works.


 >Or you may just find that adding a networked printer and calling it 
LPT2 works fine.

And where *exactly* would I call it 'LPT2' (or lpt2'. There seems to be 
no correlation between the printer name and the port which it uses...Of 
course there is a correlation by none of the config tools make that 
visible and I am unable to find any config which sets that out. Both 
OS/2 and Winblows make that correlation quite visible....I know it must 
exist, the question is where is the damn thing!


 >Thirdly, Unix filenames can be "fifo"s or "named pipes". In your case,
you could set up a program to read anything that came from the fifo,
print to the filename, and the data would be set to the waiting program.
I haven't tested this fully, but something like
rm /tmp/fifo # make sure there's nothing already there
mkfifo /tmp/fifo
lp -d printername </tmp/fifo & # & keeps the lp command running
~/dos/program.exe
should allow you to "print" a file to /tmp/fifo and have them come out
where you want.

This has possibilities. I will try it with a fifo called 'lpt2....


One other, fairly obvious thing: please remember to change the subject
line back if you're going to respond to a digest? Otherwise your message
gets "lost".

Yeah, noticed that myself....

Geoff