Hour 17. Printing in the UNIX Environment

One of the greatest shortcomings of UNIX is printing. Generating printouts is a sufficiently common task that it should be fairly easy to accomplish. However, in this one area of UNIX, there has been continual conflict between the System V and BSD groups, to the detriment of all.

This hour focuses on some of the most common UNIX commands for working with printers. It is a primer on how to find out what printers are hooked up to your system, how to send output to a printer, how to check that your print requests are in the queue for printing, and how to remove your print requests from the queue if you change your mind for any reason.