Berkeley printing system

The Berkeley printing system is one of several standard architectures for printing on the Unix platform. It originated in , and is still used to varying degrees in BSD derivatives such as FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonFly BSD. A system running this print architecture could traditionally be identified by the use of the user command lpr as the primary interface to the print system, as opposed to the System V printing systemlp command.

Typical user commands available to the Berkeley print system are:

• lpr — the user command to assign a job to the print queue
• lpq — shows the current print queue
• lprm — deletes a job from the print queue

The lpd program is the daemon with which those programs communicate.

These programs support the line printer daemon protocol, so that other machines on a network can submit jobs to a print queue on a machine running the Berkeley printing system, and so that the Berkeley printing system user commands can submit jobs to machines that support that protocol.