Printing from bama
The command to print under Unix is "lp" and the simplest
usage is
lp filename
To change your destination printer for the current print job, use
the command
lp -d printername filename
where
printername is a recognized printer such as those names in column one
of the table below.
By default, all printing done on bama.ua.edu goes to the "prt" printer which is the 3130 laser printer in the computer room at Gordon Palmer Hall. To pick up your printout, go to room 127 and look in the bins along the wall. Printouts are filed according to account name and day printed. No printout will be kept past 7 days. Coming over to Gordon Palmer Hall to pick up printout is probably is not convenient for most users, however so there are other ways to produce output. It is also to possible to request that other printers be attached to Bama
Printer name |
Capabilities |
Location |
|---|---|---|
prt |
text or Postscript files |
127 Gordon Palmer |
desktop |
text files |
Your attached desktop printer
through the use of a telnet program. |
desktopps |
Postscript files |
Same as "desktop", but you must have a Postscript printer. |
Files with specialized content may need preprocessing or other filtering before they will print.
To obtain an updated list of printers available on bama use the command
lpstat -p all -D
The "-D" will print out a description of each printer, if
we have one entered into the system. You may substitute the name of
a particular printer for the word "all" if you want to know
more about it, or if you want to know its status. To change your default
printer, use one of the text editors to edit your .profile file and
add the lines
LPDEST=printername
export LPDEST
More help is available from the man pages for lp.
Text Filters
There are some special programs which will produce organized output.
These are mailp
and filep. They output Postscript from plain text
files with special formatting. Note that "mailp" is a suitable
choice of printing programs to go in the PINE printer configuration.
To print a file named "myfile" on the default printer using
filep, the command is:
filep myfile
Another option is enscript. This is an
upgrade from an earlier program called "nenscript". Enscript is much more powerful. This program will format simple text files so
that PostScript printers will
accept it. It will also allow you to change type size and print 132
characters or more across the page in landscape mode. An example enscript
command to print in landscape mode with small type is:
enscript -r -fCourier8 -d prt myfile.txt
where myfile.txt is the actual name of the textfile you
want to print. The prt printer does double sided printing by default.
You can force it to print the previous example single sided with the
command:
enscript -r -fCourier8 -d prt -DDuplex:false myfile.txt
There are many fonts available for use with enscript and users may like to try the specialized source code formatting for languages like C or Fortran. SAS users will find enscript especially helpful for printing out SAS log files, which often need to be output in landscape in smaller type.
Requesting the Addition of Other Printers to the Bama Print Queues
If you would like to have a printer added to bama, contact the HelpDesk at 348-HELP or via e-mail at Help.Desk@ua.edu. Other specialized queues will be added in the future to handle user requests for user-supplied paper (such as with dissertations) and other special requirements.