[lboc]

The AIX print spooler can be used as a generic queueing system - I remember setting up queues with shells as backends. Jobs sent to those queues would then be executed in sequence, and could be cancelled/reprioritized/etc like any print job.

Can't claim any credit for the idea though, it was actually suggested in the documentation...

It might be possible on other unix systems too, but I never had to try it.

[ptman]

lpd/lpr can be used for e.g. a playlist/queue for music https://patrick.wagstrom.net/weblog/2003/05/23/lpdforfunandm...

[randomswede]

I once wrote a backend for what I think of as "the SysV print spooler" (hpux7/8, d-nix, and maybe AIX, but IIRC there were some subtle differences with AIX) to run rayshade on the files fed in and drop the resulting image back somewhere (this was ~30 years ago, I don't exactly recall the details).

I recall consider doing it for the SunOS box we had, but lpd/lpr (what I think of as "the BSD print spooler") was sufficiently different that while it would have been possible, it wasn't worth the extra hassle to get one more machine to be able to render on.

I don't think we ever set it up to shuffle render spool jobs from one host to another, though. And, no, "doing raytracing" was not at ALL what the machines were supposed to do, they just weren't very loaded from their normal workloads, so some of the staff played around with it for fun.

[VWWHFSfQ]

That's awesome!

[lboc]

It mentions using 'cc' here:

https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_aix_72/print...

An example using ksh:

https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_aix_72/files...