On Thu, 27 Oct 2011, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:

Because I've never used 8.2 before... or even any 8.x release, I naturally
went into the Handbook and looked for _current_ guidance on setting up
printers.  Most of that information was quite helpful, right up to the point
where it started discussing CUPS.

There's a separate article about CUPS on the Books and Articles Online page:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/cups/index.html

I just wanted to share what I did.

In a nutshell, I moved/renamed /usr/bin/lpr to /usr/bin/lpr- and replaced
it with this trivial script:
...
As you can see, the script above just takes whatever filnames are given on
the cmmand line and cats them one-by-one through psif and then the output
from that gets sent straight to /dev/ulpt0.
...
The only thing that worries me about my rather ad-hoc way of setting up
a "personal" printer (as describe above) is that I sort of wonder what
will happen if I ever try to print something when something else is
currently printing.

There's also the issue of printing large files, which will tie up the command line until the printer has buffered them all. It can be backgrounded, but... Setting up lpd isn't much more involved, and should be able to handle many more unanticipated corner cases.

(Does anybody think that maybe this should go in the Handbook?)

Maybe. The Handbook printing chapter is already kind of overstuffed and disjointed. Here's my take on setting up lpd, covering the current important stuff and building step by step:

http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/lpdprinting.html
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