This tool is part of the Samba(7) suite.
testprns is a very simple test program to determine whether a given printer name is valid for use in a service to be provided by smbd(8).
"Valid" in this context means "can be found in the printcap specified". This program is very stupid - so stupid in fact that it would be wisest to always specify the printcap file to use.
The printer name to validate.
Printer names are taken from the first field in each record in the printcap file, single printer names and sets of aliases separated by vertical bars ("|") are recognized. Note that no validation or checking of the printcap syntax is done beyond that required to extract the printer name. It may be that the print spooling system is more forgiving or less forgiving than testprns. However, if testprns finds the printer then smbd(8) should do so as well.
This is the name of the printcap file within which to search for the given printer name.
If no printcap name is specified testprns will attempt to scan the printcap file name specified at compile time.
If a printer is found to be valid, the message "Printer name <printername> is valid" will be displayed.
If a printer is found to be invalid, the message "Printer name <printername> is not valid" will be displayed.
All messages that would normally be logged during operation of the Samba daemons are logged by this program to the file test.log in the current directory. The program runs at debuglevel 3, so quite extensive logging information is written. The log should be checked carefully for errors and warnings.
Other messages are self-explanatory.
The original Samba software and related utilities were created by Andrew Tridgell. Samba is now developed by the Samba Team as an Open Source project similar to the way the Linux kernel is developed.
The original Samba man pages were written by Karl Auer. The man page sources were converted to YODL format (another excellent piece of Open Source software, available at ftp://ftp.icce.rug.nl/pub/unix/) and updated for the Samba 2.0 release by Jeremy Allison. The conversion to DocBook for Samba 2.2 was done by Gerald Carter. The conversion to DocBook XML 4.2 for Samba 3.0 was done by Alexander Bokovoy.