Basic Printing and Print Management
Counting Pages and Estimating Costs
The print accounting system charges users according to the number of pages printed, not the number of sheets of paper used. Duplex printing, therefore, does not reduce the cost of a print job: users are assessed 20¢ for each double-sided sheet, consistent with a price of 10¢ per printed page.
Users are provided with an estimate of the total cost of a job and are given an opportunity to approve the charge or cancel printing before the job is sent to a printer for processing. Please note that this is a cost estimate, and may not be accurate in all situations.
Print Management
Printing at the UNIX Command Line
Printing is accomplished using the lpr command. Only the lpr command has been modified for use with the print accounting system; another common UNIX command, lp, cannot be used. The lpr command takes a single argument specifying the file to be printed, and requires a single option, -P, which is used to specify a particular target printer; for example:
lpr -Psweet1 file.ps
There are five numbered printers at the Engineering labs: sweet1, sweet2, sweet3, sweet4, and sweet5, and these printers natively support printing only plain-text and PostScript files. Other file-types must be coerced. The lpr command cannot be used to print more than one file at a time.
Monitoring the Print Queue
The lpq command can be used to display the contents of a print queue. This command requires a single option, -P, specifying the name of the printer to query:
lpq -Psweet1
For convenience, five scripts are provided that can be used to monitor each printer's queue: check1, check2, check3, check4, and check5.
Canceling a Print Job
Users can cancel printing using the lprm command. The lprm command takes either a single argument, all, or else one or more arguments specifying the job number(s) to be cancelled, and requires a single option, -P, specifying the particular queue to be cleared; for example:
lprm -Psweet1 all
There are also five convenience scripts that can be used to cancel jobs on each printer: clear1, clear2, clear3, clear4, and clear5.
To cancel a job that has already begun printing, press the red stop button on the printer once. Use the lprm command to clear the job from the queue. Return to the printer and press the right-arrow menu button once. The printer status display should read, "Cancel Job;" press the select key to cancel printing.
