Berkeley printing system
Encyclopedia
The Berkeley printing system is one of several standard architectures for printing on the Unix
platform. It originated in 4.2BSD, and is used in BSD derivatives such as FreeBSD
, NetBSD
, OpenBSD
, and DragonFly BSD
. A system running this print architecture could traditionally be identified by the use of the user command lpr as the primary interface to the print system, as opposed to the System V printing system
lp command.
Typical user commands available to the Berkeley print system are:
The lpd program is the daemon with which those programs communicate.
These programs support the line printer daemon protocol
, so that other machines on a network can submit jobs to a print queue on a machine running the Berkeley printing system, and so that the Berkeley printing system user commands can submit jobs to machines that support that protocol.
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
platform. It originated in 4.2BSD, and is used in BSD derivatives such as FreeBSD
FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via BSD UNIX. Although for legal reasons FreeBSD cannot be called “UNIX”, as the direct descendant of BSD UNIX , FreeBSD’s internals and system APIs are UNIX-compliant...
, NetBSD
NetBSD
NetBSD is a freely available open source version of the Berkeley Software Distribution Unix operating system. It was the second open source BSD descendant to be formally released, after 386BSD, and continues to be actively developed. The NetBSD project is primarily focused on high quality design,...
, OpenBSD
OpenBSD
OpenBSD is a Unix-like computer operating system descended from Berkeley Software Distribution , a Unix derivative developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It was forked from NetBSD by project leader Theo de Raadt in late 1995...
, and DragonFly BSD
DragonFly BSD
DragonFly BSD is a free Unix-like operating system created as a fork of FreeBSD 4.8. Matthew Dillon, an Amiga developer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and a FreeBSD developer between 1994 and 2003, began work on DragonFly BSD in June 2003 and announced it on the FreeBSD mailing lists on July...
. A system running this print architecture could traditionally be identified by the use of the user command lpr as the primary interface to the print system, as opposed to the System V printing system
System V printing system
The UNIX System V printing system is one of several standard architectures for printing on the UNIX platform, and is typical of commercial System V-based operating systems such as Solaris and SCO OpenServer...
lp command.
Typical user commands available to the Berkeley print system are:
- lprLprThe lpr command is used on many Unix-like systems to assign jobs to printer queues. The name derives from "lineprinter", though it has become the commonly used command for any sort of printer...
— the user command to print - lpq — shows the current print queue
- lprm — deletes a job from the print queue
The lpd program is the daemon with which those programs communicate.
These programs support the line printer daemon protocol
Line Printer Daemon protocol
The Line Printer Daemon protocol/Line Printer Remote protocol is a network protocol for submitting print jobs to a remote printer. The original implementation of LPD was in the Berkeley printing system in the BSD UNIX operating system; the LPRng project also supports that protocol...
, so that other machines on a network can submit jobs to a print queue on a machine running the Berkeley printing system, and so that the Berkeley printing system user commands can submit jobs to machines that support that protocol.