How To List Printers In Command Line?

Unlike some Linux distros, Windows has a neatly designed graphical user interface which makes it easy to use for even casual users. However, the actual speed comes in from the command line interpreters, which can be used to execute almost everything in Windows 10.

If you are trying to switch to use command line apps to navigate around PC, here I shall discuss how you can list printers in command line interpreters.

Also read: How to modify registry using command prompt

GUI Location Of Printers

Printers in Windows 10 can be found in the Settings app and the traditional Control panel. As a quick refresher, here are both the locations in brief:

• Settings app: Open the Settings app and go to the Devices section. You will find the printers listed in the right column when you select Printers & scanners from the left pane menu.
• Control Panel: Open Control panel by typing control.exe in a Run dialog. From ‘All control panel items’, select Devices and printers.

While the traditional methods are well known, they do not allow you to access the information in the form of a list. To create such lists, you will need to use the command line.

List Printers In Command Line

For the majority of the lifespan of Windows, Command Prompt has been the default command-line interpreter. Recently, it has been switched to PowerShell, which is an improvement in many ways. You can access the printers list in both these apps, using specific commands for them.

Cmd List Printers

To obtain and extract a list of available printers, follow these steps:

1. Open a command prompt window. You can type cmd and press Enter in Windows Search for the same.
2. Here, type the following command to get the printers list:
   wmic printer list brief
3. This will display all the printers installed on your computer.
4. To export this list to a text file, you can use the following command:
   wmic printer list brief > %userprofile%\Desktop\printers_list.txt
5. This will export the list that you just saw to a text file on your desktop named printers_list.

List Printers In PowerShell

 PowerShell is the direction Windows is going, further supported by the fact that PowerShell supports many cmdlets. It also has support for the .NET framework and C++ languages. The command to get the  list of printers is slightly different, so follow these steps for the same:

1. Open PowerShell. You can use the WinX menu if you haven’t replaced PowerShell with CMD.
2. Type the following command in PowerShell to get the list of printers installed on your computer:
   Get-Printer | Format-Table
3. To export this list to a text file, you can use the following command:
   Get-Printer | Format-Table | Out-File “$env:userprofile\Desktop\printers_list.txt”
4. This will export the list that you just saw to a text file on your desktop named printers_list.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it. Now you know how to list printers command line using the methods listed above. Comment below if you found this useful, and to discuss further the same.