Stuck printer job - restart spooler or cancel it?

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi (again):

An aside. *Never* begin killing with 'kill -9'. A 'kill -9' can't be trapped and thus the receiving process has no ability to cleanup temporary files or shared memory segments. This can have nasty consequences.

Begin kills with a 'kill -hup'. Escalate to 'kill -term' and then as a last resort, 'kill -9'.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Bill Hassell]

It's important to understand how the spooler actually sends a job to the printer. It looks like this:

lpsched -> lpsched -> sh -> hpnpf -> printer

Now this is for a printer which an HP printer with an HP network cand and the printer was added using hppi or SAM (a lot of if's). And important, don't kill every hpnpf you see. You must kill the one which belongs to the printer EXB35HP. Otherwise, you just killed someone else's print job.

Print jobs get hung for anumber of reasons. One of the most common reasons is "out of paper" or "paper jam". The spooler has nothing to report or diagnose this type of problem (sort of like Windows unfortunately). Printers without a front panel are very susceptible to this problem because there is nothing for the operator to read...just blinking lights.

And of course, you may have networking problems that are causing the printer to hang.