How to print from IRIX (SGI) computers

As of 8/2/99 printing is done slightly differently on IRIX. A different Print spooler, lp, is now used. lpr will no longer work. Printing now is done directly to the printers, where in the past all print jobs were spooled through the SCIENCE Novell server.

There are a couple of advantages to this change. First, printing is totally controlled by the Unix machine, and will be more efficient, and allow more options on print jobs. Also you will be able to cancel your own print jobs.

Graphical Printing

First of all you can see a graphical list of printers by using the printers command, or select it from the System menu on the Toolchest. This dialog has many features that you can learn about in the help menu. You can drag a printer icon from this screen to your desktop, and then use drag-and-drop methods to print files to them if you wish.

Printers

LP printing commands

print

I wrote this command to make it easy to print text documents. See the print man page for details.

nenscript

nenscript unfortunately uses lpr to spool print jobs. This wont work, but there is a way to get it to go if you need it.
Try the following command for example: nenscript -2rG -p - myfile | lp -dlab
This prints myfile to STDOUT which is piped to lp to get printed. You can create you own custom command in alias form that will work good for you like:
alias myprint "nenscript -2rG -p - \!$ | lp -dlab"
Put this line in your .cshrc.local file and modify to suit your options. You would run this command by typing:
myprint myfile
Much easier!

lp

Use lp in place of lpr. It has many flags but the one you care most is the -d flag. This flag selects the print queue you want to use. ex. lp -dlab0 myfile.txt will print to the lab0, or MC209 printer. With no options it prints to the default printer (MC104).

lpstat

Use lpstat to get status of your print jobs or a lising of all the printers. lpstat will list all your print jobs, if any. lpstat -a will list all the printers available.

cancel

Use cancel to (you guessed it!) cancel your print jobs. If You use the -a flag it kills all your print jobs. Otherwise specify the job number that is reported from the lpstat command.

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