ALAN@FANDM.BITNET.UUCP (04/06/87)
I would like to thank everyone who responded to my questions
regarding flag pages and default print queues. I stopped counting the
responses after 50; at which time I decided that it was time to post a
summary.
The answer to my first question concerning flag pages out of
mail turns out to be a feature/bug in VMSMail. For all of you who were
confused by the question because you were not having the problem, it has
to do with generic print queues. If SYS$PRINT is a generic print queue,
then prints out of mail don't get a flag page unless you issue a command
that is supposed to be illegal. According to the documentation, the
/DEFAULT=FLAG is not legal for generic print queues because it is
meaningless for a generic queue. As it turns out, you need to give the
queue this attribute anyway. The catch is that you can't do it in the
same command that you specify that the queue is generic because the DCL
parser will kick it out as an error. You have to first do an
INITIALIZE/QUEUE/START/GENERIC and then do a SET/QUEUE/DEFAULT=FLAG as
separate commands. Just to add to the confusion, a SHOW QUEUE doesn't
show this attribute for generic print queues.
My guess is that mail is bad in that it checks SYS$PRINT at the
time it is creating the print file for the attribute on the queue and
then puts that attribute on the print.
It appears that I was a little bit foolish on my second
question. In order get prints to go another queue I was defining a
symbol to replace the print command. Because I was redefining the print
command, it had no effect on prints out of programs, like mail. The
solution to the problem is to redefine SYS$PRINT instead. I have
implimented this solution and it works quite well. I have written lines
into SYLOGIN.COM that figures out where the terminal is and then assigns
a print queue to it based on this. If anyone is interested in it,
please let me know.
Thanks again for all the responses. If I left anybody out in
this summary, or anyone has any questions let me know.
Alan Sutter (ALAN@FANDM.BITNET)
Franklin and Marshall College
Lancaster, PA 17604
(717) 291-4005