Specifications

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Troubleshooting the Base Operating System Spooler
Copying Spooled Jobs
Particularly in a remote spooling environment, it can be useful to make a copy of a spooled
print job. When a job is submitted to the spooler, a job description file (JDF) is created and
stored in /var/spool/lpd/qdir. If the queue is a remote queue, with something like rembak
as the backend, the job will be transferred to the print server, where enq will make another
JDF and put the job onto the specified print server queue.
If jobs seem to be vanishing at the print server, disable the print server queue (disable asc,
for the ASCII queue example), and resubmit the job. Because the asc is down,the lpstat
command should show the job as queued, but the queue will be DOWN and so the job will.
not be processed. Look in /var/spool/lpd/qdir for the JDF for this job. The last line of the
JDF is the full path name to the spooled copy of the input data stream. Copy that file to
some temporary file, such as /tmp/myfile. When you copy the file, you lose all of the
flags that were associated with the job; all you are copying is the input data stream itself.
Enable the asc queue (enable asc) and allow the job to be processed. If it vanishes, submit
the copy you made ( enq –Pasc /tmp/myfile ). If this job also vanishes, then you
need to examine the input datastream for errors, as the printer for some reason does not
print it. If the copy prints, then you probably have a problem with flags associated with the
original job.