How to select paper source with lpr?

Question

I had trouble printing PDFs with evince (fixed by Evince does not show printers) and in the meantime used lpr successfully to do things.

I found several options in the man page (page-ranges, number-up) but none to specify the paper source. In the print dialog I can chose between Tray 1 and Multipurpose Feeder.

Is it possible (and if so, how?) to choose the paper source when printing from the command line with lpr?

Solution

You should be able to list the printer options with

lpoptions -l

(add -p and the name of the printer if it is not the default). You should see lines like

InputSlot/Media Source: *Auto Main

i.e. lines in the format of keyword/longer description: value value ..., with one of the values having a * to show it is the default. The actual keywords and values will depend on your printer. You can supply any of these keywords as an option to lpr, setting it to one of the values, eg

lpr -o InputSlot=Main ...

You can use lpadmin with a similar -o keyword=value to move the * to a new default value.