NAME
lpc —
line printer control
program
SYNOPSIS
lpc |
[command
[argument ...]] |
DESCRIPTION
lpc is used by the system administrator to control the
operation of the line printer system. For each line printer configured in
/etc/printcap,
lpc may be used to:
- disable or enable a printer,
- disable or enable a printer's spooling queue,
- rearrange the order of jobs in a spooling queue,
- find the status of printers, and their associated
spooling queues and printer daemons.
Without any arguments,
lpc will prompt for commands from the
standard input. If arguments are supplied,
lpc interprets
the first argument as a command and the remaining arguments as parameters to
the command. The standard input may be redirected causing
lpc to read commands from file. Commands may be abbreviated;
the following is the list of recognized commands.
- ?
[command ...]
-
- help
[command ...]
- Print a short description of each command specified in the
argument list, or, if no argument is given, a list of the recognized
commands.
- abort
{ all | printer }
- Terminate an active spooling daemon on the local host
immediately and then disable printing (preventing new daemons from being
started by lpr(1)) for the
specified printers.
- clean
{ all | printer }
- Remove any temporary files, data files, and control files
that cannot be printed (i.e., do not form a complete printer job) from the
specified printer queue(s) on the local machine.
- disable
{ all | printer }
- Turn the specified printer queues off. This prevents new
printer jobs from being entered into the queue by
lpr(1).
- down
{ all | printer } message
...
- Turn the specified printer queue off, disable printing and
put message in the printer status file. The message
doesn't need to be quoted, the remaining arguments are treated like
echo(1). This is normally used
to take a printer down and let others know why
lpq(1) will indicate the
printer is down and print the status message.
- enable
{ all | printer }
- Enable spooling on the local queue for the listed printers.
This will allow lpr(1) to put
new jobs in the spool queue.
- exit
-
- quit
- Exit from lpc.
- restart
{ all | printer }
- Attempt to start a new printer daemon. This is useful when
some abnormal condition causes the daemon to die unexpectedly, leaving
jobs in the queue. lpq(1) will
report that there is no daemon present when this condition occurs. If the
user is the super-user, try to abort the current daemon first (i.e., kill
and restart a stuck daemon).
- start
{ all | printer }
- Enable printing and start a spooling daemon for the listed
printers.
- status
{ all | printer }
- Display the status of daemons and queues on the local
machine.
- stop
{ all | printer }
- Stop a spooling daemon after the current job completes and
disable printing.
- topq
printer [ jobnum ... ] [ user ... ]
- Place the jobs in the order listed at the top of the
printer queue.
- up
{ all | printer }
- Enable everything and start a new printer daemon. Undoes
the effects of down.
FILES
- /etc/printcap
- printer description file
- /var/spool/output/*
- spool directories
- /var/spool/output/*/lock
- lock file for queue control
DIAGNOSTICS
-
-
- ?Ambiguous
command
- abbreviation matches more than one command
-
-
- ?Invalid
command
- no match was found
-
-
- ?Privileged
command
- you must be a member of group "operator" or root
to execute this command
SEE ALSO
lpq(1),
lpr(1),
lprm(1),
printcap(5),
lpd(8)
HISTORY
The
lpc command appeared in
4.2BSD.