Note: this information is obsolete as of Emacs 20.x
Frustrating, isn't it? Trying to do a Un*x-style lpr command
on a Windows system can be trying...either your utility can print
to stdout, but not read from stdin, or
can read from stdin but not write to stdout.
Sheesh! Well, that was my problem, at least. What I
ended up doing was taking an old DOS utility, porting it to Win32
and adding an option to print to a printer specified by a UNC
pathname. From there, all I had to do was add the following to my
.emacs:
NOTE: If you are using cmdproxy as your shell and pr
has stopped working for you, you need to make sure that lpr-switches
is set as a list of options as shown above, rather than a list of
a string of options as used to be shown above. This is due to a
change in argument quoting.
Obviously, you need to substitue the UNC name of your printer
right after the -P switch (here, my printer is \\eng_admin\ljiiisi).
Port names are legal as well, i.e., LPT1: COM2: as
are file names c:/temp/printme.
The only caveat to UNC names is if you use 4DOS or command.com
as your command shell, your UNC name must conform to the 8.3
DOS-style naming conventions, at least under Windows 95. If you
use 4NT, there
doesn't seem to be a problem with long path components. If you
are using tcsh, or some other Un*x-like shell, you may have to
quote the UNC name differently. If so, let me know and I'll add
that information here.
Without further ado, here's prwin32.zip.
If you run into any problems with this utility, don't hesitate to
let me know...the obligatory mailto: link is at the bottom of the
page.
If the output of pr consists of nothing but the usage
information, you're invoking either print-buffer or
print-region, neither
of which are wired to do the right thing with prwin32.
Apparently, the cause of all this trouble is rooted in the
menus...as supplied, the menu item "Print buffer" calls
a function in lpr.el called (no suprise here) print-buffer
instead of the (now-working) function lpr-buffer.
The difference here is that print-buffer attempts to
run lpr-page-header-program to add headers to the
output file before running my version of pr. To work around this,
add the following to your .emacs:
; fix up the menu bar to use lpr-buffer instead of print-buffer
(define-key menu-bar-tools-menu [lpr-buffer] '("Lpr Buffer" . lpr-buffer))
(define-key menu-bar-tools-menu [lpr-region] '("lpr Region" . lpr-region))
(define-key menu-bar-tools-menu [print-buffer] nil)
(define-key menu-bar-tools-menu [print-region] nil)
Note: Please use the new Lpr Buffer
menu item instead of Print Buffer. Print
Buffer uses a different printing method than Lpr
Buffer and as such does not work with this utility.
09-07-98 Note: Emacs 20.3.1 has builtin
support for printing on a Windows system and this utility is no
longer necessary. Since the source code was lost when my system
went down, prwin32 is no longer begin maintained.
GNU Text processing utilites (textutils) v1.22
There is a more comprehensive port of the GNU utilities
available at Sourceforge. The
version provided here is no longer supported and I will no longer
provide support for them. -- jdp 19 July 2001
This is a preliminary compilation of the GNU textutils text
processing utilities for Win32 (Windows 95, Windows NT). Included
utilities:
ansi2knr cat cksum comm csplit cut expand fmt fold head
join md5sum nl od paste pr sort split sum tac tail tr unexpand
uniq wc
Suprisingly, most of the utilities compiled right out of the
archive, with the exception of tac, cat, tail, md5sum, and csplit
due to Win32 not having SIGHUP or SIGQUIT, or kill. Even more
suprisingly, they all seem to work!
As always, the usual caveat still applies: use at your own
risk! No warranty is expressed or implied, etc, etc, ad naseaum.
If you run into any difficulties, please drop me a line.
I added wildcard support to all utilities by linking in setargv.obj.
Path information was stripped from argv[0] when
reporting errors and usage information.
Note that in cat, I had to disable check_redirection;
the logic invovled used st_ino (undefined on Win32
systems) to prevent shell constructs like cat
file > file, so beware!
There is a more comprehensive port of the GNU utilities
available at Sourceforge. The
version provided here is no longer supported and I will no longer
provide support for them. -- jdp 19 July 2001
This is a preliminary compilation of the GNU findutils v4.1 for
Win32 (Windows 95, Windows NT), with full support for long file
names, both '\' and '/' as path separators, and drive letters.
UNC pathnames are currently unsupported.
Notes: When using the -printf switch, you may have to escape
or double up the percent signs to prevent the shell from parsing
the format specifier as an environment variable.
Use -iname for case-insensitive matching. I could determine
the case sensitivity for each file system being searched, and
match case appropriately -- any comments?
Known problems with the Win32 version of GNU Findutils 4.1:
updatedb.sh needs to be ported
locate, bigram, frcode, and code untested.
GNU Make v3.77
There is a more comprehensive port of the GNU utilities
available at Sourceforge. The
version provided here is no longer supported and I will no longer
provide support for them. -- jdp 19 July 2001
This is an archive containing GNU
Make 3.77 binaries for Windows 95 and Windows NT. It is being
provided as a convienence for those of you without means to build
it from the sources. GNU Make 3.75
is also available.
