Essential System Administration, 3rd Edition

LPRng

The LPRng package is an enhanced version of the BSD LPD print spooling system. It was initially developed in the early 1990s by PatrickPowell, first as a rewrite of the LPD spooler that was free of the licensing problems of the original code. Very quickly, however, it began to develop beyond the original LPD capabilities, and it is now a feature-rich version of the original. LPRng is available for virtually any Unix system. The home page for the project is http://www.lprng.com.

Note

Using LPRng does require knowledge of the standard BSD printing subsystem, so you’ll need to become familiar with it if your previous experience is mostly with the System V and/or AIX version.

LPRng provides the usual BSD-style user commands: lpr, lpq, and lprm. In addition, it provides versions of lp, lpstat, and cancel for compatibility. It uses the conventional top-level spool directory, /var/spool/lpd.

The LPRng version of lpr is quite a bit smarter than the standard version. It is capable of submitting print jobs directly to a remote system, so there is no longer any need to run the lpd daemon on hosts that are not also print servers themselves (eliminating its modest system load).

Here is an lpr example, which spools a print job directly to the matisse queue on system painters:

$ lpr -Pmatisse@painters 
            files

Another nice feature of LPRng is that lpd may optionally be run as the daemon user rather than root.

Installing LPRng is straightforward and well documented in both the LPRng-HOWTO document ...