lprm — cancel print jobs

lprm is a useful tool for removal of active or queued print jobs. Lets start by having a look at line printer queue status using lpq utility. Simply type lpq at the shell to produce a list of active and queued jobs for your default printer.

printer is ready and printing
Rank    Owner   Job     File(s)                         Total Size
1st     kamil   835     whereis.com - Print Map         3708928 bytes
active  kamil   1017    Acro000FQWgE9                   10109952 bytes
2nd     kamil   1018    Acro000MfwkZm                   10376192 bytes
3rd     kamil   1019    Acro0003dbDUJ                   10376192 bytes
4th     kamil   1022    IEEE Signal Processing Letters  62464 bytes

The above output shows that there are number of print jobs in the print queue. Unfortunately, the first job, whereis.com - Print Map, failed to print and it has been sitting there for a while. Meanwhile, another print job, this time a pdf acrobat document, Acro000FQWgE9, is marked as active but has failed to print and is preventing the subsequent jobs from printing. OK, to fix the problem, lets remove all the stale jobs using lprm with their job identifiers as follows.

lprm 835 1017

To verify that lprm worked we again use the lpq command.

lpq

As shown below jobs 835 and 1017 disappeared from the line printer queue.

printer is ready and printing
Rank    Owner   Job     File(s)                         Total Size
active  kamil   1018    Acro000MfwkZm                   10376192 bytes
1st     kamil   1019    Acro0003dbDUJ                   10376192 bytes
2nd     kamil   1022    IEEE Signal Processing Letters  62464 bytes

Immediately following this, our hp2420dn printer started working again. The remaining jobs were printed leaving the queue with no entries as shown below.

printer is ready
no entries