sane-find-scanner(1) SANE Scanner Access Now Easy sane-find-scanner(1)
NAME
sane-find-scanner - find SCSI and USB scanners and their device files
SYNOPSIS
sane-find-scanner [-?|-h|--help] [-v] [-q] [-p] [-f] [-F filename] [dev-
name]
DESCRIPTION
sane-find-scanner is a command-line tool to find SCSI and USB scanners
and determine their UNIX device files. Its primary aim is to make sure
that scanners can be detected by SANE backends.
For SCSI scanners, it checks the default generic SCSI device files
(e.g., /dev/sg0) and /dev/scanner. The test is done by sending a SCSI
inquiry command and looking for a device type of "scanner" or "proces-
sor" (some old HP scanners seem to send "processor"). So sane-find-scan-
ner will find any SCSI scanner connected to those default device files
even if it isn't supported by any SANE backend.
For USB scanners, first the USB kernel scanner device files (e.g.
/dev/usb/scanner0, /dev/usb/scanner, and /dev/usbscanner) are tested.
The files are opened and the vendor and device ids are determined, if
the operating system supports this feature. Currently USB scanners are
only found this way if they are supported by the Linux scanner module or
the FreeBSD or OpenBSD uscanner driver. After that test, sane-find-scan-
ner tries to scan for USB devices found by the USB library libusb (if
available). There is no special USB class for scanners, so the heuris-
tics used to distinguish scanners from other USB devices is not perfect.
sane-find-scanner also tries to find out the type of USB chip used in
the scanner. If detected, it will be printed after the vendor and prod-
uct ids. sane-find-scanner will even find USB scanners, that are not
supported by any SANE backend.
sane-find-scanner won't find most parallel port scanners, or scanners
connected to proprietary ports. Some parallel port scanners may be de-
tected by sane-find-scanner -p . At the time of writing this will only
detect Mustek parallel port scanners.
OPTIONS
-?, -h, --help
Prints a short usage message.
-v Verbose output. If used once, sane-find-scanner shows every de-
vice name and the test result. If used twice, SCSI inquiry in-
formation and the USB device descriptors are also printed.
-q Be quiet. Print only the devices, no comments.
-p Probe parallel port scanners.
-f Force opening all explicitly given devices as SCSI and USB de-
vices. That's useful if sane-find-scanner is wrong in determin-
ing the device type.
-F filename
filename is a file that contains USB descriptors in the format
of /proc/bus/usb/devices as used by Linux. sane-find-scanner
tries to identify the chipset(s) of all USB scanners found in
such a file. This option is useful for developers when the out-
put of cat /proc/bus/usb/devices is available but the scanner
itself isn't.
devname Test device file "devname". No other devices are checked if dev-
name is given.
EXAMPLE
sane-find-scanner -v
Check all SCSI and USB devices for available scanners and print a line
for every device file.
sane-find-scanner /dev/scanner
Look for a (SCSI) scanner only at /dev/scanner and print the result.
sane-find-scanner -p
Probe for parallel port scanners.
SEE ALSO
sane(7), sane-scsi(5), sane-usb(5), scanimage(1), xscanimage(1),
xsane(1), sane-"backendname"(5)
AUTHOR
Oliver Rauch, Henning Meier-Geinitz and others
SUPPORTED PLATFORMS
USB support is limited to Linux (kernel, libusb), FreeBSD (kernel,
libusb), NetBSD (libusb), OpenBSD (kernel, libusb). Detecting the vendor
and device ids only works with Linux or libusb.
SCSI support is available on Irix, EMX, Linux, Next, AIX, Solaris,
FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and HP-UX.
BUGS
No support for most parallel port scanners yet.
Detection of USB chipsets is limited to a few chipsets.
13 Jul 2008 sane-find-scanner(1)
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