Spooler Utilities Reference Manual

Introduction to the Spooler Subsystem
Spooler Utilities Reference Manual—522295-003
2-3
Spooler Components
Spooler Components
The spooler consists of the components:

The spooler supervisor monitors and communicates with the other programs and
determines when and where to print jobs. There is only one supervisor in each
spooler subsystem; however, many spooler subsystems can operate at one time.

Collector processes accept output from applications and store it on disk. There can
be up to 15 collectors associated with a given spooler. Collector processes are
described in Collectors on page 2-6.

Print processes retrieve the output stored on disk by a collector and print it on a
device. Each print device in the spooler subsystem has a print process associated
with it. FASTP is the print process released with the spooler. For more information
on FASTP, see Appendix F, Using FASTP. You can also write your own print
process. See the Spooler Programmer’s Guide for details.

Peruse allows you to control and monitor your jobs. You run Peruse interactively
from a terminal. Peruse translates your commands into messages to the
supervisor, which then carries out your instructions. Complete Peruse command
syntax is shown in Section 3, Peruse.

Spoolcom is the interface to the spooler subsystem. You can use Spoolcom
interactively to determine the status of all spooler components, to start a device
that is offline, and to send instructions to a device (to skip pages between printing
jobs, for example). System operators use Spoolcom to create and initialize the
components of the spooler subsystem. Complete Spoolcom command syntax is
shown in Section 4, Spoolcom.

The Font utility assists in creating font jobs. To configure spooler locations, you can
enter font job descriptions in an EDIT file, called a script file, and run the Font
utility, which configures those spooler locations with the indicated font jobs. A
complete description of the syntax for the script file and the command to run Font
are in Section 5, Font Utility
.

The RPSetup utility assists in maintaining spooler configurations in a network. A
complete description of RPSetup configuration parameters and the command to
run RPSetup are in Section 6, RPSetup Utility
.