Utility Programs Used By IFHP Tue Apr 13 21:39:23 PDT 1999 I recommend the following utility programs for use with LPRng. They seem to be the 'best of their breed', at least for this week: A2PS - Ascii Text to PostScript Converter http://www-inf.enst.fr/~demaille/a2ps ftp://ftp.enst.fr/pub/unix/a2ps/ Le GNU a2ps La GNU a2ps home page a2ps is an Any to PostScript filter. It started as a Text to PostScript converter, with pretty printing features and all the expected features from this kind of programs. But today, it is also able to deal with other file types (PostScript, Texinfo, compressed, whatever...) provided you have the necessary tools. Some samples of its Text to PostScript feature are available: in plain style, or in the gray style (and its alternative gray2), or with colors. (Remember! Sometimes you can't trust too much ghostview: print it, then evaluate!) You can even see more samples! (they are old though, and don't reflect very well everything that can be done.) GNU enscript This is similar to the a2ps, but with a more limited set of functionality. http://www.gnu.org - following links to ftp mirror site file - utility to determine file type ftp://ftp.astron.com/pub/file/ ftp.deshaw.com/pub/file/ Also available from the RedHat.com SRPMS in (of course) rpm format FILE(1) FILE(1) NAME file - determine file type SYNOPSIS file [ -vczL ] [ -f namefile ] [ -m magicfiles ] file ... DESCRIPTION This manual page documents version 3.21 of the file com- mand. File tests each argument in an attempt to classify it. There are three sets of tests, performed in this order: filesystem tests, magic number tests, and language tests. The first test that succeeds causes the file type to be printed. The type printed will usually contain one of the words text (the file contains only ASCII characters and is prob- ably safe to read on an ASCII terminal), executable (the file contains the result of compiling a program in a form understandable to some UNIX kernel or another), or data meaning anything else (data is usually `binary' or non- printable). Exceptions are well-known file formats (core files, tar archives) that are known to contain binary data. When modifying the file /usr/share/misc/magic or the program itself, preserve these keywords . People depend on knowing that all the readable files in a direc- tory have the word ``text'' printed. Don't do as Berkeley did - change ``shell commands text'' to ``shell script''.