OK, following or trying to follow, Wayne's advice, I am attempting to use
lp -d star temprint.txt.
to print to a raw printer. It does not work. My user account is in the lp
group, the printer is set up as raw in cups, and it is named star.
When I do
lpstat -P star
all the jobs have piled up there one after the other, and can be cleared by
lprm. There are no failure messages however.
I have tried
lp -P star -o raw
But it seems to not recognize the raw option and to only expect page
numbers.
On the other hand,
cat temprint > /dev/usb/lp0
works just fine.
If you use cat as above, there is a real risk as Wayne pointed out. If the
printer is offline, then its true, the application freezes. This is not
desirable at all. Though, its a pretty robust printer, so maybe this is a
chance I have to take. And maybe I could provide some kind of choice to
just turn off the printing command and clear the queue and tell the user to
call for assistance. But it is not good at all. Its a disaster waiting to
happen.
So it would be nice to be able to use lp. But how? And does anyone have
any suggestion why it might not be working or what to check?
I also cannot figure out, despite much googling, how to test for whether
the raw printer is on line and functioning. Nothing I have tried gives any
different result if it is powered on or off.
Peter