The print spooler comes with several clients for communicating with the server daemon. The one you're likely to use most often is lpr, which simply sends a file to the server to be queued up in a print spool and then printed. To try it out, first find or make a small sample text file. Then:

$ lpr sample.txt

If it worked, you shouldn't see any response on the screen, but your printer should start going, and soon you'll have a hard copy of your sample text. Don't worry if it doesn't come out looking quite right; we'll set up filters a bit later that should ensure that all sorts of file formats print correctly.

You can examine the list of print jobs in the print spool queue with the lpq command. The -P option specifies the name of the queue to display; if you leave it off, lpq will use the default spool, just like lpr did before:

$ lpq -Plp
Printer: lp@localhost 'Generic dot-matrix printer entry'
 Queue: 1 printable job
 Server: pid 1671 active
 Unspooler: pid 1672 active
 Rank   Owner/ID                  Class Job Files                 Size Time
active chouser@localhost+670        A   670 sample.txt               8 21:57:30

If you want to stop a job from printing, use the lprm command. You might want to do this if a job is taking to long, or if a user accidentally sends the same file more than once. Just copy the job id from the lpq listing above:

$ lprm chouser@localhost+670
Printer lp@localhost:
  checking perms 'chouser@localhost+670'
  dequeued 'chouser@localhost+670'

You can do many other operations on a print spool using the interactive tool lpc. See the lpc man page for details.