"Using cygwin Effectively with Windows" -- Draft of new User's Guide section

Joshua Daniel Franklin joshuadfranklin@yahoo.com
Thu Jul 31 16:37:00 GMT 2003


> > On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 09:41:51PM -0500, Joshua Daniel Franklin wrote:
> > >backslash notation (\\COMPUTER\Printer Share), which must be escaped
> > >from shells such as bash (\\\\COMPUTER\\Printer Share).  If you have a
> > 
> > Rather than talk about escaping backslashes, why not just use
> > //computer/printer ?
> > 

On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 08:52:23PM -0700, Rick Rankin wrote:

> OK, so I need to read *all* my messages before replying...

That's alright, I didn't just miss this one, but the whole updated
lpr. I saw some posts in the last couple of months about updating your 
lpr in cygutils, but I thought it was just something still planned for 
the future. Hannu telling me to check the man page clued me in. It
had all the information I really needed.

Here's the update:

--BEGIN
There are several options for printing from Cygwin, including the
lpr found in cygutils (not to be confused with the native Windows
lpr.exe). The easiest way to use cygutils' lpr is to specify a default
device name in the PRINTER environment variable. You may also specify
a device on the command line with the -d or -P options, which will
override the environment variable setting. A device name may be a UNC
path (\\server_name\printer_name), a reserved DOS device name (prn,
lpt1), or a local port name that is mapped to a printer share. Note that
forward slashes may be used in a UNC path (//server_name/printer_name),
which is helpful when using lpr from a shell that uses the backslash as
an escape character. No formatting is done; data is sent raw. If your
printer supports PostScript, packages such as a2ps and enscript can
prepare text files for printing. The ghostscript package also provides
some translation from PostScript to various native printer languages
(a native Windows application for printing PostScript, gsprint, is
available from the GhostScript website).
--END

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