20.7. I want to replace lp, lpstat, etc, but my programs need them

LPRng was designed as a replacement the BSD printing system. As such, it inherited its command names and options from the latter. As you might know, SystemV uses a totally different set of commands, incompatible with the BSD ones.

The good news is that the LPRng binaries include an emulation for the SystemV commands. (See lp Simulation for details. Briefly, you create links to the appropriate programs, and invoke them by the link names. Actually, these links are installed by default in recent versions.

    ln -s lpr lp
    ln -s lpq lpstat
    ln -s lprm cancel


If you make these links, calling lp, lpstat and cancel will give you a (partial) SVR4 emulation. They have their own man pages, which you should read if you need the emulation.

Since it is a partial emulation, you shouldn't expect everything to work. In particular, I would guess that any script which relies on the output format of one of your system binaries will break. Again, see lp Simulation for more details or additional suggestions.