Specifications

5-8
Guide to Printers and Printing
Clearing a Print Queue Backlog
To clear the queuing system, you must stop qdaemon and check if the /var file system is
full. If so, use the following procedure to clear the queue directories and restart the
qdaemon.
1. Make sure you are logged in as root.
2. If possible, let all current print jobs finish printing or cancel them. To cancel a print job,
issue the lpstat command to get the print job number. Then use the enq command to
cancel each job:
enq –x JobNumber
The lpstat command displays information about the current status of the line printer. The
enq command enqueues a file.
3. Issue the following command to stop qdaemon:
stopsrc –s qdaemon
4. Issue the following commands to verify that qdaemon did not fork other processes:
ps –ef | grep qdaemon
ps –ef | grep pio
The ps command shows the current status of processes. The grep command searches
a file for a pattern.
If you get one line back from each of the above grep commands, skip step 5 and go to
step 6. If you get more than one line, go to step 5.
5. If other qdaemons or pios were returned by the ps –ef command, kill these processes by
issuing the following command with each process ID:
kill –9 pid
The following example shows a qdaemon returned by ps –ef. The process ID is 3357.
root 3357 2288 0 13:32:21 – 0:04 dtterm
To kill this process ID, enter kill –9 3357 at the command line.
6. Perform this step only if it is necessary to save the current print jobs from being deleted.
Otherwise, proceed to step 7.
If your print job is queued in one of the following directories, make a copy of it, and place
it in /tmp; you can print it when the queuing system is running again.
Note: In these directories, the files will have unfamiliar system names.
/var/spool/qdaemon
/var/spool/lpd
7. If the /var file system gets too full, you may experience problems with qdaemon or the
spooler. Large print jobs may fail, or 00root files with zero lengths may appear in your
qdir directory. Rebooting the system in this case may not clear out the files or restart
qdaemon.
Enter the df command and look in the %used column for /var to see if the file system
is too full. Free space in the file system as necessary.
The df command displays information about total space and available space on a file
system.
8. Change the directory as follows:
cd /var/spool/lpd/qdir
9. Issue a pwd command to verify that you are in the proper directory. Then, remove all
files in this directory using the rm command: