ciaraldi@rochester.ARPA (Mike Ciaraldi) (04/27/87)
Maybbe somebody can give me some advice.
My friend has the following situation:
System: Altos 986 running Xenix. Accounting program written in
SMC Basic. 20 Meg hard disk, with about 6 Meg free.
What Usually happens: When the program wants to print a report it
does an "OPEN" statement on the file "LPR". Then it
does a series of "PRINT" statements to that channel number,
and finally a "CLOSE". After the CLOSE, the report
starts to print.
What sometimes happens: The program executes the OPEN all right,
but fails on the first subsequent PRINT, with an
error 103. Resetting the Basic interpreter and
telling it to rerun the program usually works.
If not, doing it a second time always does.
So, what's going on? Error 103 in SMC Basic is "miscellaneous
operating system error." Not very informative.
This is a two-user system, but this happens even with only one
user logged in. The printer is on and ready, and nothing
seems to change in the system status between the times when
it works and doesn't. I thought of running out of spool
space on the disk, but these are one-page reports and there is
6 Meg free.
I called SMC, and it seems they sold the
rights to Basic to another company, Concept Omega, which sells
it as Thoroughbred Basic. Since I don't have a software
maintenance contract with them, they won't answer technical questions.
Local dealer hasn't been any help either.
So, I turn to my fellow news-readers. Is there any way to trap
the exact error coming back from Xenix?
What can go wrong writing to the line printer spooler?
Are there any tests I can perform to help track this down?
Thanks in advance,
Mike Ciaraldi
ARPA: ciaraldi@cs.rochester.edu
uucp: seismo!rochester!ciaraldi