Windows & DOS: Issues & Discussions

Does anyone know how I can find printers from a dos prompt?

I'm trying to create a batch file which cats the printers and
their locations to another file which I will use later in the
script.

Maybe windows has a file from which I may read in this
information?

Thanks!

Very clunky, but:

for /f %i in ('net view') do net view %i | find "Print" >>result.txt

Explanation:
'net view' - command to display all sharing-enabled computers in a workgroup or domain.
'for /f %i ...' - for each line of result (%i) from 'net view', list the shares on that computer.
'| find "Print" - Pipe the preceding output through FIND.COM and look for the string "Print", indcating a shared printer.
'>>result.txt' - append the output to the file "result.txt", NOTE: >> to append, not > to write to or we'll only see the last positive match in our file.

The resulting file (result.txt in this case) will look something like:
[Netbios name, Service, Comment]

AC_PRN Print Accounts department multifunction

PR_DESJ Print Public Relations department Colour Deskjet

SH_DMP Print Shipping office dot-matrix label printer

Hope it helps.

If you want anything better I think you're going to have to look at some VB scripting and active directory-based looking-up.