Printing to a shared printer from DOS

If you or your client is using an old-DOS based program to do work (for example, Wordperfect for DOS) – and you need to print to a printer which is shared on the network, you first need to map the printer to an LPT port. You do this by using the following command in a dos prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd):

net use lpt3 \\SERVER_NAME\PRINTER_NAME

You can then set up your dos program to print to lpt3 and it will be sent to that printer. To print right from the command line, you could use the following syntax:

copy c:\test.txt lpt3