Fast personal printing _without_ CUPS

[Warren Block]

On Thu, 27 Oct 2011, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:

> Because I've never used 8.2 before... or even any 8.x release, I naturally
> went into the Handbook and looked for _current_ guidance on setting up
> printers.  Most of that information was quite helpful, right up to the point
> where it started discussing CUPS.

There's a separate article about CUPS on the Books and Articles Online 
page:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/cups/index.html

> I just wanted to share what I did.
>
> In a nutshell, I moved/renamed /usr/bin/lpr to /usr/bin/lpr- and replaced
> it with this trivial script:
...
> As you can see, the script above just takes whatever filnames are given on
> the cmmand line and cats them one-by-one through psif and then the output
> from that gets sent straight to /dev/ulpt0.
...
> The only thing that worries me about my rather ad-hoc way of setting up
> a "personal" printer (as describe above) is that I sort of wonder what
> will happen if I ever try to print something when something else is
> currently printing.

There's also the issue of printing large files, which will tie up the 
command line until the printer has buffered them all.  It can be 
backgrounded, but...  Setting up lpd isn't much more involved, and 
should be able to handle many more unanticipated corner cases.

> (Does anybody think that maybe this should go in the Handbook?)

Maybe.  The Handbook printing chapter is already kind of overstuffed and 
disjointed.  Here's my take on setting up lpd, covering the current 
important stuff and building step by step:

http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/lpdprinting.html