Printing and Online Help

Printing:

Printing: The lpr command is used to print a file. Generally, you need to know the Queue Name of the printer you wish to print to. A list of public printers maintained by the ACCC Computer Center and the associated printer queue name is given below. (On Tigger, you can use the lpstat command for a listing of printer names, while the command lpstat -dP is used on Icarus. Some of the more popular ones are listed below.)
Example: To print index.html to the printer in CCC340, you would type in:
lpr -Pccc340 index.html

Status of print queue: The lpq command is used to check the status of a print queue. Again, you need to specify the print queue you want to check on.
Example: To check the status of the print queue in SEL2265, you would type in:
lpq -Psel2265

Removing a job from the print queue: The lprm command is used to remove a job from the print queue. You need to know the print queue and also the job number. You get the job number from the lpq command. You can only remove those jobs that belong to you and cannot remove other users' jobs. To remove all of your jobs in the print queue, simply replace the job number with a dash.
Example: To remove job number 550 from the queue grc105, you would type in
lprm -Pgrc105 550

To remove all of your jobs from a print queue, you would type in
lprm -Pgrc105 -

For details, check out the man page of lpr , lprm and lpq. Note that you are not notified when your file has been printed.

Screenshot of lpr and lpq commands in action.

Queue Name	Location of the Printer
bsb	Basement of Behavioural Sciences Building
ccc340	Rm 340, 3rd Floor South-East Wing of CCC
grc105	Rm 105, Benjamin Goldberg Research Center, West Campus
lib1444	Rm 1444, Main Library
sel2054	Rm 2054, Science and Engineering Labs
sel2058	Rm 2058, Science and Engineering Labs
sel2263	Rm 2263, Science and Engineering Labs
sel2265	Rm 2265, Science and Engineering Labs
src	Student Residence and Commons, East Campus
srh317	Rm 317, Student Residence Halls, West Campus

Online Help:

The UNIX online help is called man pages (short for Manual Pages). It is accessed using the man command. Although there exists a web-based interface to the man pages called Man-cgi., these examples below reflect commands being typed at the command prompt (i.e. in a telnet session). Generally, man pages take some getting used to. If the first few sections do not make sense, simply scroll down until you come to the examples and they will make more sense.

Man pages are divided into sections which is explained in detail in the man page of the man command. If you see a man page saying something like sleep(1) or sleep(3), then the number in parenthesis deals with the section of the man pages. Different sections implies different uses of the same name, in this case sleep exists in section 1 and also in section 3.

To get detailed help about a particular command that you would simply type in man cmd (where cmd is what you need to know more about). Example: man ls will give you the detailed help file for the ls command.

If you want to do something but are not familiar with the command name, you can also search the man pages by keyword. This will search the description string for the keyword. For this, you have to use the -k option to the man command. A word of warning, sometimes this can result in a very long listing, so you may have to use a pager (more or less) to view the output. Example: man -k tape will result in listing all commands that deal with using Tapes. To page a very long listing, you would type in man -k copy | more