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Bye CUPS: Printing with netcat

Turns out printing doesn't have to be hard

        William Blankenship
                              
[https] 57 min ago           
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I recently migrated my daily laptop to FreeBSD. I have a networked HP
LaserJet. After 10+ years of CUPS on Linux, I had been dreading
setting up this printer on yet another machine. But the day came. I
had to print quite a few documents so I decided to bite the bullet
and setup printing on FreeBSD.

Off to the FreeBSD Handbook I went. Conveniently, they have a chapter
on Printing. Given my past experience with CUPS, I figured this was
going to be a treacherous journey so I read the entire document
before getting started. Section 4 stood out:

    Direct printing to network printers depends on the abilities of
    the printer, but most accept print jobs on port 9100, and nc(1)
    can be used with them.

    nc netlaser 9100 < sample.txt

[https]

I had to read this several times. WTF. Use netcat? Surely I was
missing some wizardry in the FreeBSD kernel that configured a network
printer as some local network target aliased to netlaser, which
handled all the printing magic for me. But how? Years of arbitrarily
picking from a list of similarly named print drivers in CUPS
prevented my brain from accepting what was written. I was confused.
After trying to decipher the other sections in the document, I
decided I would go for it.

nc 192.168.1.226 9100 < file.pdf

It. Just. Prints.

[https]

After 10+ years of Linux distributions pushing CUPS on me. Over a
decade of this complex stack of drivers and daemons that I never
quite trusted but "couldn't live without." FreeBSD comes along and is
like "yeah, just use netcat." And they're right. Just use netcat.

Bye CUPS.

            
           
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