How to print out all non-hidden files recursively in a dir using lpr

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.

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.

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).

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