33.8. Managing Print Jobs
When you send a print job to the printer daemon, such as printing
a text file from Emacs or printing an
image from The GIMP, the print job is
added to the print spool queue. The print spool queue is a list
of print jobs that have been sent to the printer and information
about each print request, such as the status of the request, the
the job number, and more.
During the printing process, the Printer Status icon appears in
the Notification Area on the panel. To
check the status of a print job, double click the Printer Status,
which displays a window similar to Figure 33.12, “GNOME
Print Status”.
To cancel a specific print job listed in the GNOME Print Status, select it from the list and
select => from the pulldown menu.
To view the list of print jobs in the print spool from a shell
prompt, type the command lpq. The last few
lines look similar to the following:
Rank Owner/ID Class Job Files Size Time
active user@localhost+902 A 902 sample.txt 2050 01:20:46
Example 33.1. Example of lpq output
If you want to cancel a print job, find the job number of the
request with the command lpq and then use
the command lprm job
number. For example, lprm
902 would cancel the print job in Example 33.1, “Example of lpq output”. You must have proper permissions to
cancel a print job. You can not cancel print jobs that were
started by other users unless you are logged in as root on the
machine to which the printer is attached.
You can also print a file directly from a shell prompt. For
example, the command lpr sample.txt prints
the text file sample.txt. The print
filter determines what type of file it is and converts it into
a format the printer can understand.
