6.6. Remove Files After Spooling

The lpr -r option is extremely dangerous and has proven to be fatal to a large number of system administrators, so it should be used with caution. Unfortunately, it is used in a large number of shell scripts and by default in a vast number of programs so it is present in the LPRng software.

Its action is quite simple. After sending the print job to the spooler, it will try to unlink the original files. It will do the unlinking operation as the original user, but if the original user had permissions to remove, say, /etc/password, then the file will be removed.