System V Printing System

The UNIX System V printing system is one of several standard architectures for printing on the UNIX platform, and is typical of commercial System V-based operating systems such as Solaris and SCO OpenServer. A system running this print architecture could traditionally be identified by the use of the user command lp as the primary interface to the print system, as opposed to the BSD lpr command, though some systems provide lpr as an alias to lp.

Typical user commands available to the SysV print system are:

  • lp -- the user command to print
  • lpstat -- shows the current print queue
  • cancel -- deletes a job from the print queue
  • lpadmin -- a sysadmin command that configures the print system
  • lpmove -- a sysadmin command that moves jobs between queues

The original System V printing system remains proprietary; however, the Solaris print system, heavily modified from the original, is open source as part of the OpenSolaris project. The Common Unix Printing System emulates both System V and Berkeley print architectures on the interface level, though its internal architecture is different from both.

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