lp works but lpr does not

Question

If I understand lp and lpr correctly, you can run "lp -" and print what you type, and you should be able to do the same thing for "lpr". Also "lp filename" and "lpr filename" should print the given file. Both of these work on my machine with the lp variant (lubuntu 14.04), but the lpr variant does not work in either case. lpr origionally was not installed, and so I did "apt-get install lpr", which seemed to install successfully.

The problem is that when I run either of the above lpr variants, I get "lpr: lp: unknown printer". What could be causing this?

Solution

Lubuntu uses the CUPS printer spooler by default. To install an lpr program for CUPS you need to install the package cups-bsd instead of lpr.

The package lpr contains the BSD lpd printer spooler. Its lpr programm doesn't know about your default printer for CUPS but tries to use the printer lp which doesn't exist on your system.

Comments

[tim]

Just to make it visible: It's the same for Debian.