Popcorn Dave has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Fellow monks,

I'm trying to send output to my laser printer. All well and good except I can't get it to actually eject the page. What happens is that the text is sent, and the light is flashing on the laser printer showing there is a page waiting to be ejected and that's it. If I physically push the button to eject the page, it will give me the page. I've tried setting autoflush but it's not working.

Here's what I was playing with: 

use strict;
use FileHandle;

STDOUT->autoflush(1);
#$| = 1;

my $text = "Printing test...\n";

open FH, ">LPT1:";
print FH "$text\n";

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Neither $++ or use FileHandle seems to be doing the trick. Should I be sending an eject code instead of or in addition to autoflush?

Thanks in advance!

Update: Adding .chr(12) to the string $text kicks the page out like I was after.

Thanks to ikegami for pointing out my output file error.

Useless trivia: In the 2004 Las Vegas phone book there are approximately 28 pages of ads for massage, but almost 200 for lawyers.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Autoflushing Laser printer
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Nov 16, 2004 at 01:40 UTC

    STDOUT->autoflush(1); makes STDOUT autoflush, not FH. $| = 1 make the currently selected file handle autoflush, which isn't FH in your snippet.

    my $text = "Printing test...\n";
open FH, ">LPT1:";
select(*FH);
$| = 1; # Turn on autoflush for FH
select(*STDOUT);
print FH "$text\n";

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Re: Autoflushing Laser printer
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Nov 16, 2004 at 03:34 UTC

    As you've discovered, you need to send the printer a formfeed character. Otherwise, the unfinished page may sit in the buffer forever, silently drop, or stick around with the next print job.

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