COBOL Manual for TNS and TNS/R Programs

Printer and Spooler Output
HP COBOL Manual for TNS and TNS/R Programs—522555-006
30-3
Spooler Components
Supervisor Process
The supervisor process communicates with and monitors the other processes and
decides when and where to print output. The supervisor is an HP product and is
started and managed by the system manager. A system can have more than one
spooler supervisor; this can be useful for systems with vast numbers of print jobs or
systems with special reporting needs. If a system has only one supervisor, its name is
usually $SPLS.
Collector Process
The collector process receives the output. Your spooler system has one or more
collectors. Each installation chooses its own names, but typical process names for
spooler collectors are $S and $C.
Print Process
Each print device accessible to a spooler has an associated print process that
executes in coordination with the spooler supervisor. The print process provided by HP
reads the records stored on disk and delivers them to its associated print device. An
installation can provide its own print processes that read the stored records and
perform other operations on them, such as performing a statistical analysis of data in
the records or formatting the data for a special-purpose output device.
SPOOLCOM
SPOOLCOM is an HP product. It is a loadfile that can be started by an interactive user
or a system operator. System operators, who are members of the super group, can do
more with SPOOLCOM than application programmers can.
As an application programmer running SPOOLCOM interactively, you can examine the
job queue and the status of print devices and change attributes of jobs you own.
A system operator running SPOOLCOM can examine the queue and the status of
devices but can also create and initialize the other components of the spooler system
and make changes to the attributes of any job in the spooler.
For more information about SPOOLCOM, see the Spooler Programmer’s Guide.
PERUSE
HP provides a perusal program named PERUSE, with which you can control and
monitor your jobs in the spooler. PERUSE is oriented more to the interactive user than
to the system operator. When a member of the super group calls PERUSE, that user
must handle individual jobs rather than groups of jobs, and PERUSE does not give that
user the control over devices that SPOOLCOM does.
Your installation can write its own perusal processes. For more information about
PERUSE, see the Spooler Programmer’s Guide.