Printing from command line

Question

Please can anybody explain what exactly these commands and options do:

find /home/mike/Duck/ -type f -iname '*.txt' -print 0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' f;
 do lpr "$f" && mv "$f" /home/mike/Duck/printed/ ; done

and what if i want to print all extension in that directory what should i do ?

Answer 1

The code snippet you have given requires a modification, you need -print0 instead of print 0.

This script will find (find) all the files having extension txt in /home/mike/Duck/, send them to printer (lpr) one at a time and then if that returns a success (&&) then the file will be moved (mv) to /home/mike/Duck/printed/.

If you want to print files having any extensions, use this:

find /home/mike/Duck/ -type f -name '*.*' -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' f;
 do lpr "$f" && mv -i "$f" /home/mike/Duck/printed/ ; done

This assumes that all files having extensions are in the format file.ext, it will also print the files having multiple dots. The -i with mv will give you a prompt before overwriting.

Also note that this can be done using only find:

find /home/mike/Duck/ -type f -name '*.*' -exec lpr {} \; -exec mv -i {} /home/mike/Duck/printed/ \;