One of the major problems faced by administrators of large sites is how to distribute printcap information. They would like to have a single printcap file either distributed by a file server (NFS) or by some other method such as rdist. By using the server and oh tags, information for the specific sites can be separated out. For example:
# printcap
pr1:lp=pr1@serverhost1:oh=*.eng.site.com,130.191.12.0/24
pr2:lp=pr1@serverhost1:oh=*.eng.site.com,130.191.12.0/24
pr1:lp=pr2@serverhost2:oh=*.admin.site.com
pr2:lp=pr2@serverhost2:oh=*.admin.site.com
pr1:server:oh=serverhost1.eng.com:lp=/dev/lp:tc=.common
pr2:server:oh=serverhost2.admin.com:lp=/dev/lp:tc=.common
.common:sd=/usr/local/lpd/%P
The above example has some interesting effects. The pattern is used as a glob pattern and is applied to the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the host reading the printcap file. For example, *.eng.site.com would match host h1.eng.site.com but would not match h1.admin.site.com. Thus, the effects of the first couple of entries would be to specify that the pr1 and pr2 printers on the eng hosts would be pr1@serverhost1, and on the admin hosts would be pr2@serverhost2,
Also, the lpd daemons on serverhost1 and serverhost2 would extract the additional information for pr1 and pr2 respectively, overriding the common lp entries.