An old-school shell hack on a dot matrix printer

drewdevault.com

14 pointssgolestane4 comments

Oh my gosh, I'd forgotten about the ed joke (link at the bottom of the article). Magnificent stuff.

Not a line printer; those are very (very) different than a dot matrix printer, and it's an interesting use of a dot matrix printer, anyway.

Ok, we've put dot matrix in the title line above.

They have the same sort of form feed, but usually with wider paper and green bars. iirc they print a whole line at a time, which is why they are so-named. It's easy to see how one would get confused, since there is `/dev/lp` and `lp` or `lpr`

yea, if I `man 4 lp` (manpage for the device) on Amazon Linux 2 it is telling me about "parallel line printers" -- (`man lp` (for the lp command) mentions "hardcopy device, such as a printer or microfilm recorder".)

Very cool nonetheless.

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