Printing works differently depending on whether you use System V or BSD UNIX.
Printing is one of the areas where UNIX systems diverge the most. As we mentioned in Chapter 3, there are two separate camps of UNIX systems, those that are System V-based and those that are BSD-based. Most of the differences between System V and BSD are hidden to the user: for the most part, the only differences a user will see are different command-line options and, occasionally, different output. When it comes to printing , however, BSD and System V UNIX use a completely different spooling method, and a completely different set of commands.
Don’t be confused if you see that both sets of commands work on your system, e.g., if you can print files using both lp and lpr. It’s common for modern UNIX systems to support both, so users migrating from one system to another don’t have that steep a learning curve. Since they do the same thing, it doesn’t matter which commands you use: just use the ones you’re most comfortable with.
Get WYNTK: UNIX System Admininistrator now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
