NAME

lpc — line printer control program

SYNOPSIS

lpc [command [argument ...]]

DESCRIPTION

The lpc utility 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,
change the status message for printer queues (the status message may be seen by users as part of the output of the lpq(1) utility).

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.
bottomq printer [jobspec ...]: Take the specified jobs in the order specified and move them to the bottom of the printer queue. Each jobspec can match multiple print jobs. The full description of a jobspec is given below.
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. This command will also look for core files in spool directory for each printer queue, and list any that are found. It will not remove any core files. See also the tclean command.
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 ...} -msg message ...
down {all | printer} message ...: Turn the specified printer queue off, disable printing and put message in the printer status file. When specifying more than one printer queue, the -msg argument is required to separate the list of printers from the text that will be the new status message. The message does not need to be quoted, the remaining arguments are treated like echo(1). This is normally used to take a printer down, and let other users find out why it is down (the lpq(1) utility will indicate that the printer is down and will 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).
setstatus {all | printer} -msg message ...: Set the status message for the specified printers. The -msg argument is required to separate the list of printers from the text that will be the new status message. This is normally used to change the status message when the printer queue is no longer active after printing has been disabled, and you want to change what users will see in the output of the lpq(1) utility.
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.
tclean {all | printer}: This will do a test-run of the clean command. All the same checking is done, but the command will only print out messages saying what a similar clean command would do if the user typed it in. It will not remove any files. Note that the clean command is a privileged command, while the tclean command is not restricted.
topq printer [jobspec ...]: Take the specified jobs in the order specified and move them to the top of the printer queue. Each jobspec can match multiple print jobs. The full description of a jobspec is given below.
up {all | printer}: Enable everything and start a new printer daemon. Undoes the effects of down.

Commands such as topq and bottomq can take one or more jobspec to specify which jobs the command should operate on. A jobspec can be:

a single job number, which will match all jobs in the printer's queue which have the same job number. Eg: 17,
a range of job numbers, which will match all jobs with a number between the starting and ending job numbers, inclusive. Eg: 21-32,
a specific userid, which will match all jobs which were sent by that user. Eg: jones,
a host name, when prefixed by an `@', which will match all jobs in the queue which were sent from the given host. Eg: @freebsd.org,
a job range and a userid, separated by a `:', which will match all jobs which both match the job range and were sent by the specified user. Eg: jones:17 or 21-32:jones,
a job range and/or a userid, followed by a host name, which will match all jobs which match all the specified criteria. Eg: jones@freebsd.org or 21-32@freebsd.org or jones:17@freebsd.org.

The values for userid and host name can also include pattern-matching characters, similar to the pattern matching done for filenames in most command shells. Note that if you enter a topq or bottomq command as parameters on the initial lpc command, then the shell will expand any pattern-matching characters that it can (based on what files in finds in the current directory) before lpc processes the command. In that case, any parameters which include pattern-matching characters should be enclosed in quotes, so that the shell will not try to expand them.

FILES

/etc/printcap: printer description file
/var/spool/*: spool directories
/var/spool/*/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

HISTORY

The lpc utility appeared in 4.2BSD.