| 234 |
| Print to a USB printer from the command prompt |
| You typically print to a parallel-port printer by copying a file to |
| the lpt1: device. Because USB devices don't connect through an LPT |
| device, you can't take the same approach to print to a USB printer |
| from the command prompt. However, you have several options that will |
| If a network adapter is connected to your network, you can share the |
| printer with another machine on the network and map the printer to |
| LPT2 or LPT3. For example, |
| net use LPT2 \\<machine>\<printer share> /yes |
| shares the printer on LPT2. By sharing the printer, you can copy files |
| from the command prompt to the printer on that port. |
| If you don't have a network adapter, you can install the Microsoft |
| loopback adapter, which emulates a network adapter, create a printer |
| share on your machine, then use the Net Use command to print to the |
| Alternatively, if the USB printer is your machine's default printer, |
| you can use Microsoft Notepad to print an ASCII file to the printer. |
| start /min notepad /P <filename> |
| prints the file from Notepad to the printer, where "filename" is the |
| name of any file that you can open in Notepad that you want to print. |
| You don't have to include "start /min" for this technique to work, but |
| you'll want to include this command if you're printing from a batch |
| file to minimize the command window while the batch file runs. |
| Otherwise, the Notepad executable will steal focus away from the batch |
| file that issues this command and could stall the batch file after |
| printing is finished. To continue processing the batch file, you'd |
| need to click the command window. |
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