5.15   Print Commands

Intro courtesy of Alex Kent.

One of the first things to be done is to learn how to check the queue. It would also be good to know how to cancel the print job(s).

The printer should function with essentially three commands from the user point-of-view. These commands are lpr, lpq and lprm.

lpr sends files to the print queue. It accepts both command line file names and stdin as items to print. The command line should look something like: lpr [options ...] [files ...]

If no files are given, then stdin is read as input. The options must all start with a '-' and must be individual. A -hd is not allowed for example, with the h and d being different options, they must be -h -d.

Options that are relevant to printers here are as follows:

• -h disables headers.
• -t print roff style files
• -d print dvi style files
• -#NUM prints some NUMber of copies
• -Pprinter routes job to printer named, if this option is not specified, then print job goes to spruce. (tradition)
• -Zoption[,option...] Specifies print options for job. Currently these options include duplex, 2up and 4up. There maybe multiple options by separating them with commas. Currently 2up and 4up require input to be text only.