Spooler Programmer's Guide

Introduction to the Spooler Subsystem
Spooler Programmer’s Guide—522287-002
1-20
Declaring and Initializing Devices
The state of a device describes what the device is doing and determines which
Spoolcom commands are valid. The meanings of the device states are as follows:
Declaring and Initializing Devices
Devices are declared and initialized using Spoolcom commands, and the spooler can
be active, warm, or cold.
A device is declared with the DEV command. As soon as you issue the DEV
command, the device is considered to be part of the spooler subsystem, with all default
attributes, but it is in the offline state. You can then change the default attributes or
leave them as they are. After specifying all attributes, bring the device into the waiting
state (in which it is ready to print jobs) with the DEV START command.
If you initialize the device with the spooler in a warm or cold state, you can bring the
device into the waiting state with the SPOOLER START command.
You can change the attributes of a device only after putting it in the offline state with
the DEV DRAIN command. The DRAIN subcommand allows the job currently printing
(if any) to finish, then puts the device offline.
The usual way to cause a job to leave the spooler subsystem is to send it to an output
device (the only other way is to delete the job from the system). In most cases, the
output device is a printer; however, it can also be a terminal, tape drive, disk, or virtual
device, as explained in Declaring and Initializing Devices on page 1-20.
Although the supervisor makes the decision to print a job on a particular device, the
supervisor does not directly interface to a device. Instead, each device has an
BUSY The device is currently printing a job.
WAITING The device is ready to print a job, but no job is available to print on
the device, because either there are no jobs in the device queue or
none of the jobs in the queue have a form name that matches the
form name of the device.
OFFLINE The device is not available for printing jobs. Device attributes can
be changed only when the device is in the offline state.
SUSPENDED A job was printing on the device, but printing has stopped as a
result of a Spoolcom DEV SUSPEND command.
DEVERROR A Guardian file-system error occurred on the device while a job was
printing.
PROCERROR The supervisor has determined that the device print process is not
working correctly and writes a message to the error log file. (These
messages are typically sent to the console, although their
destination is set at system startup time and can be changed with
the Spoolcom SPOOLER ERRLOG command. The error log
messages are described in the Operator Messages Manual.) The
device is therefore unusable until the print process is restarted.