DEVICE = AUXLOC:

Updated September 2008

This causes the file to be redirected to the auxiliary port on the current terminal, which hopefully has been set up to further redirect the printout to an appropriate printer attached to the terminal or to the PC on which the terminal emulator is running. Note the trailing colon.

Under Windows, DEVICE=AUXLOC: only makes sense when the Windows machine is acting as a telnet server (i.e. running ATSD), in which case, the client terminal or emulator would handle auxiliary port request the same as if the host was a UNIX machine.

If the client is ATE, the application can override the client's auxiliary port printer choice at runtime by sending the extended TAB command AG_SPOOLCFG prior to printing a file to the AUXLOC: device; see AG_SPOOLCFG for details. Or, it can use the following syntax:

DEVICE = AUXLOC:<printername>

For example, DEVICE = AUXLOC:LASER would send the file to ATE client and then tell ATE to print it to the printer named LASER (overriding the current ATE printer configuration). Note that this would require that there either be a printer visible to the ATE client whose name started with "LASER", or that there was a sys:laser.ini or ashcfg:laser.pqi file already installed on the ATE client, containing the printer initialization commands to be used.

Note that the <printername> could itself be a pseudo-printer specification, such as DEVICE=AUXLOC:PROMPT:, in which case ATE would prompt for the printer choice, even if ATE had previously be configured to print to a specific printer without prompting.

Another ATE-only variation is the ability to force the PASSTHROUGH option on or off, but otherwise accept the existing ATE printer configuration. This is accomplished with the following syntax:

DEVICE = AUXLOC:+GDI

or

DEVICE = AUXLOC:+PASSTHROUGH

It is also possible to set the mode (GDI or Passthrough) in the printer name; see the topic Set Printer Mode Using Printer Name for more information.

Note on Multiple Copies

See PRTCOPIES for information on how copies are handled with AUXLOC: printing.