lpr: cannot open printer description file

Question

On a debian with cups, I get the following error with an alias of mine

cc2ps cms2CompsGlobEnrich.m
[cms2CompsGlobEnrich.m (C++): 4 pages on 4 sheets]
lpr: cannot open printer description file
[Total: 4 pages on 4 sheets] sent to the default printer
[2 lines wrapped]

cups should be supposed to put the lpr and similar commands under /usr/local/bin(after some googling) however they are not there, I tried to copy the ones under /usr/bin very naively, as expected it did not help ,there is a permission problem somewhere I guess

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The message cannot open printer description file comes from the traditional BSD printing system. Since you have CUPS, there's no reason to use the BSD printing system (which you'd have to configure separately, is less powerful and is harder to configure). Install the CUPS BSD emulation commands to provide the BSD interface (lpr and lpq) with the CUPS backend (by default, CUPS provides only a System V interface: lp and lpstat). On Debian, it's in the cups-bsd package.

By the way, there's no reason why lpr and company would be in /usr/local/bin. Tutorials explaining how to install a printing system would put them there, but your distribution provides them already (you just need to install the package), and it puts the executables in /usr/bin. There is no permission issues (these tend to trigger a “permission denied” error message).