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Guide to Printers and Printing
Spooler Parts
The base operating system spooler can be viewed as a process or a subsystem
with a beginning, points-in-between, and an ending. To accomplish its tasks,
the base operating system spooler has four basic parts:
- The enq command is the true entry point to the spooler,
and as such is the beginning of any spooler activity. This command accepts
requests for job processing.
- The qdaemon is responsible for accepting and tracking
all jobs submitted to the spooler by the enq command.
It is also responsible, once all the necessary resources are available, for
allowing a queue backend to process a job. The qdaemon
is one of the points-in-between in the spooler process.
- The spooler backend is a collection of programs invoked by the spooler's qdaemon command to process a job in some queue. The backend
sends output to a specific device, such as a printer. When the backend is piobe, it involves a formatter filter, which in turn involves
a printer colon file. The backend is one of the points-in-between as well
as the ending, since the backend contains the specific process that will deliver
the processed job to its final destination.
- The configuration file, /etc/qconfig,
describes the configuration of available queues and devices. Both the enq command and the qdaemon command
refer to the configuration file. This configuration file is considered as
conceptually important as the other three spooler parts due to its critical
value to the correct operation of the base operating system spooler as a whole.
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