Re: Send command to printer

[Tapani Tarvainen]

On Sat, Aug 21, 2021 at 09:19:53PM +0200, Julius Hamilton (julkhami@gmail.com) 
wrote:

> I would like it to be printed in real time.

At this point we'd need to know more about the printer in question,
how it's connected &c. Printing the lines (or characters) as soon as
they occur is not really possible with normal print spoolers, but if
you can send data directly to the printer device or have a custom
program for printing, then it may be possible (depending on the
printer - page printers like lasers obviously can't do it).

> Is there any way to avoid piping it into a print command every time?

If you want printing in real time (whatever that actually means here,
maybe a character or a line at a time), you'll have to send the stuff
to be printed in real time as well. You may not need to use a pipe
or a regular print command though, but you have to send the stuff
to something, somehow, at least as fast as you want them printed.

> Can I write in a bashrc file that every command is to have a certain
> pipe command appended to the end of it?

Not quite that way, I think, although the exec command I suggested
could be used with somewhat similar effect (piping stdout of each line
to a command). I'm not sure it'd be useful for your purposes, however.

By the way, if your intent is to print the terminal session as it
appears to the user on the terminal, you should print stderr as well.

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen