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 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-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 scan-
       ners, 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
       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 informa-
               tion 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
               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 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)