home | help
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|-?]	[-v] [-q] [-p] [-f] [-F filename] [devname]

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 "processor" (some old
     HP  scanners  seem to send "processor"). So sane-find-scanner will find any
     SCSI scanner connected to those default device files even if it isn't  sup-
     ported 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 oper-
     ating  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-scanner tries to
     scan for USB devices found by the USB library libusb (if available).  There
     is no special USB class for scanners, so the heuristics 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 product 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 con-
     nected to proprietary ports. Some parallel port scanners may be detected by
     sane-find-scanner -p.  At the time of writing this will only detect  Mustek
     parallel port scanners.

OPTIONS
     -h, -?  Prints a short usage message.

     -v      Verbose  output. If used once, sane-find-scanner shows every device
	     name and the test result.	If used twice, SCSI inquiry  information
	     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 devices.
	     That's  useful if sane-find-scanner is wrong in determining the de-
	     vice 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	output	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 devname
	     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)

home | help