by Ian Kuon and Mark Calder

Everyone knows how to print a file in unix (lpr) but when printing large jobs as we are in this class it is also useful to know how to manage the jobs. These summary is for printing on Nyquist. Printing from CEB531 directly is easy but expensive and therefore won't be discussed here.

lpr - this is the basic command to print a file

lpstat - this is the main command for determining the status of the printer

lpq - is aliased to lpstat -p -o which this displays a screen similar to the following. This is probably the most useful command

There are two printers of interest to us, b54lj, the printer in B54, and hpps_1, the printer in 540. As of this writing the default printer on nyquist is hpps_1 so if you print without specifying a destination it will come out in 540.

Now the important part. If you accidentally print an excessively large document you probably want to cancel it before you end up crashing the printer or printing hundreds of unnecesary pages. To kill a print job get it's job number from the printer queue of the printer. For instance hpps_1-6 then type

or alternatively

can be used to cancel all your print jobs in the queue. Note you can only call jobs you sent to the printer.

Note: Because of the way the printing is set-up, if you try to cancel a print job that you sent from NTrigue while logged into Nyquist, you will be told permission denied even though you can see you printed it. The solution is to log into poisson.ee.ualberta.ca. From there you can cancel your jobs as per the above instructions.

Man Pages for lp, lpstat

Andrew Leung, for cancelling my job so his could print.

If you find any errors in this page e-mail me at ickuon@ee.ualberta.ca.

Written by Ian Kuon and Mark Calder members of SecureT group.