The Berkeley printing system is one of several standard architectures for printing on the Unix platform. It originated in 2.10BSD, and is used 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.
Unix is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, development starting in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.
FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular open-source BSD operating system, accounting for more than three-quarters of all installed BSD systems.
NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was forked. It continues to be actively developed and is available for many platforms, including servers, desktops, handheld devices, and embedded systems.
Typical user commands available to the Berkeley print system are:
lpr — the user command to print
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.
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