Services for UNIX 1

[FJAY]

Good Afternoon - What is the advantage of Microsoft Services for UNIX?

 

[pmcmicha]

Depends on what you are looking to do. It is handy since it loads a number of commands which can be called upon just as if I was on a unix box. Meaning I can now take advantage of sed, awk, cat, etc in my windows environment. I can setup an NFS mount point if I want.

Bottom line, it adds on to what you normally can do in the windows environment with little hassle. I have it loaded on my PC since I mainly work in the unix world and from time to time it has come in handy. Where as before I would have to send files to the unix server via ftp to process, I can now do this on my PC.

 

[FJAY]

Good Afternoon - I'm trying to do at least two things:

(1.) I want to send a command from inside my Vb program to the C shell command line to print a file to a printer.

(2.) When I print from the command line a .doc, or .pdf file using the following command:

lp -d printername filename

It prints out a bunch of garbage.

I will be glad if someone can give me a solution to these problems. Thanks.

 

[pmcmicha]

This is due to the fact that the 'lp' command is reading in the contents of the file directly, not the text or what you want to have printed. To get this to print correctly, some sort of filter would have to be installed so that the 'lp' command would recognize what is going on. As to where you would get this filter, I am not entirely sure.

Something you could try to do is have your VB program call a perl script. Perl can be setup to open the program (ie. word, adobe acrobat, etc) and then traverse the menu options to print. This way it would be Word or Adobe that is doing the printing and not the 'lp' command.

Not sure what else could be done, anyone else have any ideas?

 

[PHV]

Why use unix commands to do typical windows task ?
In VB use OLE Automation (or old fashionned DDE) to open the doc and then print it.

Hope This Help
PH.