The Line Printer daemon (lpd) provides printer services for local and remote users.

It is an
essential service that is started at boot time from a startup script. On both Red Hat systems,
lpd is started by
the /etc/rc.d/init.d/lpd script that is generally included in the startup by default, and can be
controlled
chkconfig or tksysv.
Use the lpd script to stop, start, or reload the Line Printer daemon. Because the printcap file
is read only by lpd during its startup, the reload option is useful to incorporate changes if you
edit the printcap file. Here is an example of using the reload command with the startup
script:
# service lpd reload
Reloading lpd: [ OK ]
The printcap file is not the only place in which configuration parameters can be set for lpd.
Red Hat
and many other Linux distributions use the LPRng implementation of lpd, which can read
configuration settings from /etc/lpd.conf. Although not all printcap settings can be overridden
by lpd.conf, several can. Generally, however, there is no need to customize the lpd.conf file
because the default values used by LPRng are correct for most configurations. An example
is our sample Red Hat system. It has an lpd.conf file, but that file does not contain a single
active entry.