2

find . -type f | grep -v '/\.' lists out all non-hidden files in the current dir recursively.

Example of this command given the following file tree

.
├── css
│   ├── base.css
│   └── main.css
├── img
├── index.html
└── js
    └── app.js

$ find . -type f | grep -v '/\.'

./index.html
./css/main.css
./css/base.css
./js/app.js

But how do I print all these listed files using lpr?
I tried find . -type f | grep -v '/\.'|lpr but this only prints this list instead of printing each file.

Bentley4
  • 1,998

3 Answers3

4

lpr prints out, what is sent to it via STDIN. So you need to invoke lpr for each file found by find:

find . -type f ! -name ".*" -print0 | xargs -0 lpr
  • -type f searches for files
  • ! is a logical not, hence ! -name ".*" will omit hidden files (with some help from https://superuser.com/a/101012/195224)
  • -print0 separates the individual filesnames with \0 so that this will also work with file names with white spaces in it.
  • xargs finally executes lpr with the list of filesnames it receives (-0 again tells that \0 is used as a delimiter).

This command will list only non-dotfiles, but also those in dotdirs.

If you also want to exclude dotdirs, extend the find command to

find . -type f ! -regex ".*/\..*" ! -name ".*"

And finally, as some versions of lpr have obviously a problem with empty files, omit these also:

find . -type f ! -regex ".*/\..*" ! -name ".*" ! -empty

As a sidenote: To get a nicer layout of your printout (includes file name) you should consider to replace lpr by a2ps.

Community
  • 1
mpy
  • 28,816
1

With just the find command, use its -exec option:

find . -type f ! -name ".*" -exec lpr '{}' \;

which passes every matching file name to lpr (the '{}' is expanded to the each file name in turn).

manyon
  • 33
  • 5
1

lpr can take multiple files, so

lpr ./*

...will print all files in the current directory. For recursiveness, if you have bash 4+, you can use

shopt -s globstar
lpr ./**

If sending directories to lpr causes problems, you can always use a for loop with a test (the second, recursive one requires globstar to be set):

for f in ./*; do [[ -f "$f" ]] && lpr "$f"; done
for f in ./**; do [[ -f "$f" ]] && lpr "$f"; done
evilsoup
  • 14,056