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An old-school shell hack on a dot matrix printer (drewdevault.com)
14 points by sgolestane on Nov 11, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 4 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.


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.


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




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