Since I discovered the joy of using the ratpoison window manager I'm trying to do all tasks I need to perform on my system using the command line.

One of those frequently used tasks is printing out documents or scanning in files. Until today I used the software viewer of my documents to print and simple-scan to scan my files.

Nowadays I use the command line to perform those tasks. To print out documents I use the lp command:

"Get the status off all printers on your system"
$ lpc status all

"Print the desired file to a specific printer"
$ lpr -P PRINTERNAME FILE/TO/PRINT.XX

"Show the printing queue"
$ lpq -P PRINTERNAME

"Cancel a specific print job using the queue id"
$ lprm ID

"Cancel all printing jobs"
$ lprm -

Those are the commands I regularly use to print my documents.

For scanning I use scanimage from sane. There are too many options to explain so I just give hereby the one I use to scan A4 formatted files to pdf:

"List your scan devices"
$ scanimage -L

"Scan the image to a pdf file"
$ scanimage -p > fileName.pdf

Off course there are many ways to perform those tasks using the command line. Those are only the ones I use on my fedora machine. I'm always open for suggestions!