Controlling the Parallel Port

[Grant Edwards]

Cary O'Brien wrote:
>Simon Faulkner  <News at Titanic.co.uk> wrote:
>
>>Is it easy to control (read/write) the Parallel Port in linux
>>using Python?
>>
>>I am hoping to use it to drive some simple electronics
>
>You need to do two things to access the parallel port from
>a user program.
>
>1) call ioperm() to get permissions to access the ports.  man ioperm
>   should provide the gory details.  Requires root access.
>
>2) use the inb() macro to read, and the outb() macro to write.  See
>   man outb for the gory details.  Pay attension to the note about using
>   -O or -O2 on the compile command line.  They matter.
>
>Now to access this from python, you can either 
[...]

The alternative way to access I/O ports is by doing open(),
lseek(), read(), write(), on /dev/port.  This is slower than
using the above method, but it can be done directly from Python
using the posix file-descriptor i/o stuff in the "os" module.

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