September 2022

rlpr, printing in a foreign network

How it print in some network that you are just visiting? You have a working wifi connection and you just want to print a few pages without the need to configure printing properly on your PC (linux PC). Most office network printers understand postscript and pdf files natively. All you have to do is print the document into a pdf file on your Linux PC and then send it somehow to the printer.

All these office printers have a LCD display and some button. Somewhere there is a menu item or a button to see the printer's hostname and IP address. Write the IP address down and then send your PDF file to that IP:

Linux has a command called rlpr and you can use it to send files directly to an IP address:
rlpr -H TheIPaddress file.pdf
Example: rlpr -H 192.168.3.45 presentation.pdf
older versions of rlpr might require this syntax:
rlpr -H TheIPaddress -P lp file.pdf
Some of those printers understand also ftp:
ftp TheIPaddress
>put file.pdf
>bye

You can't really select specific paper trays with this method. It will print on some default paper size. It's usually good enough if you just want to print a few pages on A4 or Letter paper and it require zero configuration on your side. Just try! It might work.

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