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LPD Control File

This section discusses the format of the lines in the control file, which is sent to the line printer daemon. Each line of the control file consists of a single, printable ASCII character, which represents a function to be performed when the file is printed. Interpretation of these command characters is case‑sensitive. The rest of the line, after the command character, is the command's operand. No leading white space is permitted after the command character. The line ends with an ASCII new line.

Those commands, which have a lower case letter as a command code, are used to specify an printing request and are often referred to as filters. These filter commands are not included in the list that follows, as they are no longer used as originally designed.

The LPD control file commands, which use upper case, are used to describe parametric values or background conditions. Some commands must be included in every control file; these are 'H' (responsible host) and 'P' (responsible user). Additionally, there must be at least one lower case command to produce any output.

The commands are as follows:

C (Class for banner page)

This command sets the class name to be printed on the banner page.

H (Host name)

This command specifies the name of the host, which is to be treated as the source of the print job. The command must be included in the control file.

I (Indent Printing)

This command specifies the number of columns the remote system indents the output when you specify f or p as the value of filter.

J (Job name for banner page)

This command sets the job name to be printed on the banner page. The job name is conventionally used to display the name of the file or files, which were "printed".

L (Print banner page)

This command causes the banner page to be printed.

M (Mail When Printed)

This entry causes mail to be sent to the user given as the operand at the host specified by the 'H' entry when the printing operation ends (successfully or unsuccessfully).

N (Name of source file)

This command specifies the name of the file from which the data file was constructed.

P (User identification)

This command specifies the user identification of the entity requesting the printing job. This command must be included in the control file.

T (Title for pr)

This command provides a title for a file, which is to be printed.

U (Unlink data file)

This command indicates that the specified file is no longer needed. Note that this command must only be used for data files.

W (Width of output)

This command limits the output to the specified number of columns for the 'f', 'l', and 'p' commands. The width count operand must be all decimal digits. It can be silently reduced to some lower value. The default value for the width is 132.

X (Extended print options)

Extended Infoprint Server print attributes. This command can be used to specify additional print attributes corresponding to the z/OS OUTPUT statement parameters.