DICE - Printing Information

Summary

Which Printer

To find a list of Informatics printers, use the command lpstat -a from a DICE machine. The location can be derived from the queue name, e.g. if113m0 is located in IF-1.13. Printers containing m0 in the name are monochrome, c0 are colour.

Sending a file

The command lpr is used to print files under UNIX. There are several options which can be given to lpr, but the simplest form of the lpr command just takes the file names to print:

 lpr file1 file2 file3

The above command prints file1, file2 and file3 to your default printer. To find out your default printer, type

If this returns no value (i.e. blank), then you need to specify which printer to use as follows:

Checking on progress

To examine the printer queue, use the command lpq. This will print a summary of the jobs in progress, like this:

Cancelling a job

Jobs can be removed from the printer queue with the command lprm. The job numbers (as given by lpq) of the jobs which are to be removed should be specified:

Changing your default printer

The lpr, lpq, and lprm commands can all take an option of the form -P printer, to select a different printer from the normal.

Your default printer (the one you get if you don't give a -P option to lpr, etc) is defined by the environment variable PRINTER. This is set automatically when you log in to what the system guesses will be the most appropriate printer for you to use. To change it to, say, lwsb3 for the current session, at the shell prompt, type

To set your default printer permanently, create a .benv file in the top level of your home directory and add the following line:

export PRINTER=name_of_your_default_printer

More printing information

You can find more information on printing under DICE, particularly on how to deal with printing problems, in the printing section of the Support FAQ