martinstefanik / pyprint

A simple CLI tool for basic (bulk) printing on Unix-like operating systems.

pyprint

A command line tool for sending files to print on a Unix-like operating system such as Linux or macOS. The main purpose of the tool is to allow the user to easily print a large number of files following a certain naming pattern that are located in different directories on the file system. This functionality can essentially be replicated by piping the output of the command line tool such as find or fd into lp with arguments and option names that can be discovered with lpoptions and lpstat. The names of these options and the names of their valid values are typically dependent on the brand of the printing device. pyprint is intended to simplify this process, especially for users not familiar with these commands and/or piping.

pyprint is currently not intended to be very customizable. The goal is to provide the most common options with reasonable defaults.

Installation

The tool can be installed manually using pip by downloading/cloning the repo and by running

pip install --user .

inside the directory. The directory can be removed after the installation is complete.

Alternatively, if git is installed on the system, pyprint can also be installed by running

pip install --user git+https://github.com/martinstefanik/pyprint

In order to remove pyprint, simply run

pip uninstall pyprint

pyprint requires the cups package to be installed on the system. Many Linux distributions come with cups pre-installed, but you might need to install it manually.

Usage

Details about the usage of the tool can be obtained by running pyprint --help. Note in particular the --dry-run option which allows the user to test the files filtered out by the regular expression given to the --regex option before actually sending the files to print.

An example of a common call is given by

pyprint --printer HP --sides 2 --staple --regex ".*\.pdf$" ~/Documents/library

This prints all the PDF files located in ~/Documents/library two-sided and stapled from the printer called HP. If HP does not support two-sided print or stapling, a corresponding error is raised.

If the --printer option is omitted, the user is shown the list of available printers and is prompted to choose one of them as follows

Available printers:
  1) HP_LaserJet_office
  2) HP_LaserJet_hall
Printer to use:

See here for details about Python regular expressions syntax.