Printing Tools

You already have some printing capability from the Terminal application's printing menu options and built in to the rest of your Mac OS X system. The command line, however, has its own printing facility, allowing you to direct the output of commands to a printer without having to select that output in the terminal and use the menu options to print. These command-line tools are actually fairly sophisticated, although they provide only a minimalist interface to the printing architecture. Print queuing, job-status notification, and print-job logging are all part of the standard Unix lpr printing system.

Since Mac OS X 10.2, Mac OS X has included Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) software. This package includes versions of print commands ...

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