Printing Standards?

[Dominic Dunlop]

From:  Dominic Dunlop <domo at tsa.co.uk>

In article <789 at longway.TIC.COM> urban at rand.org (Mike Urban) writes:
>What incipient or existing standards, if any, specify
>the Shell-level printer interface (lpr and its friends)?

Aha.  That terminal ``r'' tells me you're a Berkeley-ite.  Which is too
bad, I'm afraid.  The draft 1003.2 shell and tools standard specifies a
pretty-much emasculated version of the System V.2 (or thereabouts) lp
print spooling command (which some might argue was fairly impotent in
the first place).  As far as ``friends'' go (lpadmin, enable, lpshut and
so on in the case of System V), none are specified.  This is seen as
1003.7 (administration) territory.  If you can get hold of a draft
(somebody in Rand must have one), you'll find lots of extended
description about how little a conforming application can assume from
lp, and rationale about how it should be possible to implement it as a
shell script, namely

	cat > /dev/lp

The X/Open Portability Guide, edition 3, volume 1, does little better: it
describes a few more options, and the cancel utility, but they're all
optional -- in effect, all an XPG-conformant system has to offer is the
interface described in 1003.2.

All rather depressing really.
-- 
Dominic Dunlop

Volume-Number: Volume 20, Number 111