Print Files to the Default Printer

lpr

Now that you know what printers are on your system, it's time to actually use them to print something. Printing to your default printer (determined with lpstat -d) is easy.

$ lpr Lovecraft_-_Call_of_Cthulhu.txt 

That's it: Just lpr and the name of the text file. Pretty simple.

Note

You probably expect that you can print ASCII text files on the command line using CUPS, but it might surprise you to learn that you can also print PDFs or PostScript files. But that's it; don't try to print Word, OpenOffice.org, or any other kind of non-text-based or non-PostScript-based documents, or your printer will spew out pages of garbage!