When you send a print job to the printer daemon such as printing text
file from Emacs or printing an image from
The GIMP, the print job is added to the print
spool queue. The print spool queue is a list of print jobs that have
been sent to the printer and information about each print request such
as the status of the request, the username of the person who sent the
request, the hostname of the system that sent the request, the job
number, and more. To view the list of print jobs in the print spool,
open a shell prompt and type the command lpq. The
last few lines will look similar to the following:
Example 21-1. Example of lpq output
Rank Owner/ID Class Job Files Size Time
active user@localhost+902 A 902 sample.txt 2050 01:20:46 |
If you want to cancel a print job, find the job number of the request
with the command lpq and then use the command
lprm job number. For
example, lprm 902 would cancel the print job in
Example 21-1. You must have proper permissions to cancel
a print job. You can not cancel print jobs that were started by other
users unless you are logged in as root on machine to which the printer
is attached.
You can also print a file directly from a shell prompt. For example, the
command lpr sample.txt will print the text file
sample.txt. The print filter determines what type
of file it is and converts it a format the printer can understand.
