Printing Two-Sided from the Command Line (Shallow Thoughts)

Printing Two-Sided from the Command Line

The laser printers we bought recently can print on both sides of the page. Nice feature! I've never had access to a printer that can do that before.

But that requires figuring out how to tell the printer to do the right thing. Reading the man page for lp, I spotted the sides option: print -o sides=two-sided-long-edge. But that doesn't work by itself. Adding -n 2 looked like the way to go, but nope! That gives you one sheet that has page 1 on both sides, and a second sheet that has page 2 on both sides. Because of course that's what a normal person would want. Right.

The real answer, after further research and experimentation, turned out to be the collate=true option:

lp -o sides=two-sided-long-edge -o collate=true -d printername file