Interesting "Feature" of lpsetup

[Bill Carpenter]

On 15 Dec 89 06:12:35 GMT, gil at limbic.UUCP (Gil Kloepfer Jr.) said:

gil> Important folks.../dev/lp doesn't seem to pass all characters
gil> without translation (ie. it's NOT raw!!)...  Lenny and I tried to
gil> connect a laser printer to the parallel port, and Lenny thought
gil> he had a bum printer...  When we circumvented the lp spooler and
gil> directed the output of the programs to /dev/rawlp, all worked
gil> (and worked WELL, at that).

This is documented, but you're not likely to happen upon it casually,
especially if you don't have the man pages the come with the
development set.

(1)  The differences between /dev/lp and /dev/rawlp are described in
lp(7M).  The "lp" command defaults to /dev/lp.

(2)  To get to a printer via rawlp using the "lp" command, you use a
"_R" suffix on the destination.  E.g., "lp -d waldo" goes to /dev/lp;
"lp -d waldo_R" goes to /dev/rawlp.  (I have done this and it works.)

(3)  For 3.51, you can get the same effect as (2) by using "-oRAW".
E.g., "lp -d waldo -oRAW".  (I haven't tried this personally, but it's
described in lpadmin(7M).  Might not work for all printer types.)

Until this discussion came up and I went looking in the man pages
again, I didn't notice that there were several things added to the
"lp" command between 3.5 and 3.51.  If you haven't been there in a
while, you might like to have a browse.  (The "_R" jazz has been there
for at least a couple releases, though.)
--
   Bill Carpenter         att!ho5cad!wjc  or  attmail!bill