Urgent LP problem!

[Tim Medford]

Help....!

On my production Unix server suddenly nothing will print. I have not changed anything on the server in months. Not matter what I try to print I get a syntax error:

(saifprod)/tmp> lp psout112003
lp[4]: Syntax error at line 4 : `(' is not expected.


I've tried lpshut and lpsched and it did not fix it.

Any ideas??

[John Dvorchak · Accepted solution]

I am curious of the date and permissions of lp. I think the first thing that I would do is make sure which "lp" command is being run:

root> which lp
/usr/bin/lp

Then do an ll on it:
root> ll /usr/bin/lp
-r-sr-xr-x 1 root bin 45056 Aug 6 2002 /usr/bin/lp

The above was from an HPUX 11i box with current patches.

If all of that checks out you may be looking for the interface file, psout1, and see if it has been modified or corrupted in some way.

Good luck,

[Tim Medford]

Please ignore this, I'm an idiot.

After retracing my steps from this morning I realized what I had done.

There's a big difference between

cat myfile | lp
and
cat myfile > lp

I had overlaid the lp command with the contents of myfile. Luckily I was able to get it back from another machine with an identical config.

Thanks