A.P. Lawrence

This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open Desktop or Openserver.

There is lots of Linux, Mac OS X and general Unix info elsewhere on this site: Search this site is the best way to find anything.

Printing FAQ

Why do I lose the last few lines of my print job?

This shouldn't happen on modern Unixes, but if you do have this, you can try adding "sleep 30" (or even longer) at the very end of the interface script.

The problem in older kernels was that the script would end before all the output had been sent out through the driver. The kernel would see that that no process was using that data, so it would flush it away. Adding the "sleep" keeps the script from exiting, hopefully long enough for all the data to get out. If not, increase it. Note that this doesn't cause you to wait longer for anything in the printing process if the sleep time is equal to the time it takes to print the last page.