piping to lp is broken after perl upgrade

[myuserid7]

I recently moved to CSW blastwave repositories - including perl.

I have a perl script that accepts a C program and does a pretty print to a network printer using lp().

The postscript is capture in a HERE doc.

$prolog = << ENDPROLOG;
.
.
.
A bunch of postscript.
.
.
.
ENDPROLOG

$PRINT_CMD = '/usr/bin/lp';
$outcmd = "| $PRINT_CMD";

open(OUT,$outcmd);

print OUT $prolog;

After upgrading perl the script is no longer printing the postscript but is printing the postscript code.

I was wondering if someone could point me to a better way.

[moritz]

You should check if open was successful, and also if close was:

open my $output, '|-', $PRINT_CMD
    or die "Can't open pipe to $PRINT_CMD: $!";
print $output $prolog;
...
close $output or warn "Error while closing pipe to $PRINT_CMD: $!";

Maybe that'll give you some clue about what's wrong.

[myuserid7]

I got excited when I saw your close - I thought for sure the open handle was causing the grief.

Added the error checking. Nothing.

Something is foobar here and I am not sure it is perl. Even from the command line...

cat foo.ps | /usr/bin/lp -o nobanner

prints the postscript code while...

/usr/bin/lp -o nobanner foo.ps

Prints the postscript document. So I really can't expect my perl script to work as written.

[GrandFather]

I don't see an issue in the code you've shown except that you're not using strictures (use strict; use warnings;). It wouldn't surprise me a great deal to find that there is something that was waiting in your heredoc to bite and has now bitten. It may help if you:

my $prolog = << 'ENDPROLOG';

so interpolation doesn't happen.

[myuserid7]

Thanks for your reply.

I created a files called test.ps.

$ cat test.ps 
%!PS
/Courier findfont
20 scalefont
setfont
72 500 moveto
(Hello world!) show
showpage

If I send it to the printer, it works. I get a Hello World.

So here is a recreation of the script that is failing.

#!/opt/csw/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use warnings;

my $prolog = <<ENDPROLOG;
%!PS
/Courier findfont
20 scalefont
setfont
72 500 moveto
(Hello world!) show
showpage
ENDPROLOG
my $PRINT_CMD = '/usr/bin/lp -o nobanner';
open my $output, '|-', $PRINT_CMD
    or die "Can't open pipe to $PRINT_CMD: $!";
print $output $prolog;
close $output or warn "Error while closing pipe to $PRINT_CMD: $!";

[myuserid7]

I ended up abandoning the use the csw perl for this script. Instead, I pulled the 5.8.9 source and complied it on my Solaris 10 machine using gcc4.

I pointed the test script at the new compile and it started working.

Sadly, I am not that confident in the blastwave perl now. Surely just paranoia but once bitten...