So i have an assignment and im new to bash, and ive been on the first question worth 3% for hours. It is discouraging.

I am supposed to take some small files, and print them to a specific printer, such that the small files are concatenated into one file. The file name has to be included in the file that gets printed.

Should I be looking to concatenate the files into one file with the file names included, and then print them?

something like: -printfunction -printername < file*

I am just looking for a starting point here to help me understand and get started.

Here I'm assuming that the files are just plain text.

First you can concatenate the files using the 'cat' command, then you can convert the output to postscript format and send it to a printer with the 'a2ps' command.

Do some research on those two commands and try to work out how to put it all together. If you get stuck post back showing what you have tried.

Cheers,

Evo2.

You may find these useful
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-G...tml/index.html
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

Here is an option.

cat file1 >> file2

then print

lp final file

Read for more details.

man lp

man lpr

Hope this helps.

I think I am on the right track.

If i did this: cat file1.txt file2.txt | lp -d printer

it sent one file to the printer i told it too (I think) But I don't think that the file names were included in the printout, which is what I need. I ran through the man pages for lp and lpr, and the only thing I saw that might have helped was -0 number-up=16 for lp which only put 16 files onto the page. When I tried to print using lp with this, it didn;t work (got an error).

are there any other print functions that I could take a look at that might be able to include the file names?

Hint: you are using 'cat' as I suggested, but I also suggested another program...

Evo2.

You'll find the 'echo' cmd useful for the filenames ...

well lets just say you take two files, you can use them as arguments to a script and create a simple script to do this
using the syntax "scriptname file1 file2 filetobeprinted" when using the script