Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

> I looked in wp and it appears to be assigning the LAST printer port as 
> device:
> device=`dmesg |grep lp |tail -n1| cut b1-3'
>
> dmesg |grep lp   lp0: using parport0
>                    lp1: using parport1
>                    lp1 out of paper  (it is not in use or printer is off)


Is there some way to rewrite the device=... line to select the first three 
characters of output of grep lp, rather than the first three characters of 
the last line?  Is there some equivalent to 'tail', maybe 'head', which 
would extract the first line produced by grep?  Then linux, like DOS, 
would use lp0 as default.  (Unless of course it is not plugged in then it 
still won't work).

> dmesg |grep lp |tail -n1  :  lp1 out of paper
> The whole line inside the ` ` :  lp1
>
> So wp uses the last printer rather than lp0.  How would I change it to use 
> lp0 instead of lp1 where I have two lps?  Can I simply edit it to read
> device=lp0 ???
>
> In cases of two parports, could you write a script that would choose the 
> parport that is NOT 'out of paper' to print to?