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 UNIX operating system; the
LPRng project also supports that protocol. The
Common Unix Printing System (or CUPS), which is more common on modern
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...
distributions and also found on
Mac OS X, 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 connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface ident ...
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. Some companies (e.g. D-Link in model DP-301P+) have a tradition of calling the queue name “lpt1” or “ LPT1”.
A printer that supports LPD/LPR is sometimes referred to as a "TCP/IP printer" ( TCP/IP 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.
See also
*Lp (Unix) The printing subsystem of UNIX System V is one of several standardized systems for printing on Unix, and is typical of commercial System V-based Unix versions such as Solaris and SCO OpenServer. A system running this print architecture could tra ...
* LPRng
* Legacy printing
* Common Unix Printing System (CUPS)
* System V printing system
* Spooling
* Print server
* Application layer
* Foomatic
References
External links
FreeBSD LPD Man Page
Computer printing
Printing protocols
Unix
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