The Line Printer Daemon protocol/Line Printer Remote protocol (or LPD, LPR) is a network printing protocol for submitting print jobs to a remote printer. The original implementation of LPD was in the Berkeley printing system in the

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginni ...

UNIX Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

operating system; the LPRng project also supports that protocol. The Common Unix Printing System (or CUPS), which is more common on modern

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

distributions and also found on

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

, supports LPD as well as the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP). Commercial solutions are available that also use Berkeley printing protocol components, where more robust functionality and performance is necessary than is available from LPR/LPD (or CUPS) alone (such as might be required in large corporate environments). The LPD Protocol Specification is documented in RFC 1179.

Usage

A server for the LPD protocol listens for requests on TCP port 515. A request begins with a byte containing the request code, followed by the arguments to the request, and is terminated by an ASCII LF character. An LPD printer is identified by the

IP address An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. IP addresses serve two main functions: network interface i ...

of the server machine and the queue name on that machine. Many different queue names may exist in one LPD server, with each queue having unique settings. Note that the LPD queue name is case sensitive. Some modern implementations of LPD on network printers might ignore the case or queue name altogether and send all jobs to the same printer. Others have the option to automatically create a new queue when a print job with a new queue name is received. This helps to simplify the setup of the LPD server.Winet
s InetLPD server documentation. A printer that supports LPD/LPR is sometimes referred to as a "TCP/IP printer" (

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are ...

is used to establish connections between printers and clients on a network), although that term would be equally applicable to a printer that supports the

Internet Printing Protocol The Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) is a specialized communication protocol used between client devices (computers, mobile phones, tablets, etc.) and printers (or print servers). The protocol allows clients to submit one or more print jobs to t ...

References

External links

FreeBSD LPD Man Page
Computer printing Printing protocols Unix {{Network-software-stub

Usage

See also

References

External links