Cups - Command Line Printing - Cheat Sheet

Written by Wim Stockman - on 04 jun 2020 Updated - on 17 dec 2022

Cheat Sheet

• List available printers:

lpstat -p

• View default printer:

lpstat -d

• You can combine the commands:

lpstat -p -d

• Show pending print jobs

lpstat -W not-completed

• Show all status information

lpstat -t

• Setting the default printer:

lpoptions -d PRINTERNAME

This overwrites the ~/.cups/lpoptions file be carefull if you had some options in

• View the options available for your printer:

lpoptions -p PRINTERNAME -l

• to print with a specific options:

lp -p PRINTERNAME -o Media=A4 -o fit-to-page -o Quality=Draft

CREATING SAVED OPTIONS

So you can acces them later with an instance of your printer and don't have to retype everything.

lpoptions -p PRINTERNAME/INSTANCE1 -o Media=A4 -o fit-to-page -o Quality=Draft

then you can print with these options by specifying the instance

lp -p PRINTERNAME/INSTANCE1 file-to-print.ps

SETTING DEFAULT OPTIONS

Just setting the default options of your printer throught the command line.

lpadmin -p PRINERNAME -o OPTION=VALUE

e.g sudo lpadmin -p STAR -o PrintSpeed=1Middle

CANCEL JOBS

• Cancel the current job:

cancel

• Cancel all jobs

cancel -a