email from cancelled print jobs

[Unix Administrator_5]

We have an hp 9000 running 11.00 with the hp printer installer software.

At times we have to cancel a large number of jobs in a print queue (network printers). The mail bombs the owner (which forwards to a list of people) with "cancelled print job" messages. Is there any way to safely turn this off?

[S.K. Chan]

You can't turn this off from the source. If you take a look quickly at /usr/bin/cancel by doing ..
# strings /usr/bin/cancel|grep mail
you'll see that the "mail" program is called within the "cancel". The only thing I can think of is to filter the messages on the receipient side. We use "procmail" to filter a lot of such email so that they would not fill up the mailbox.

[Thomas Schler_1]

Before you're cancelling the print jobs, you could change /usr/bin/mail to something else that does nearly nothing. After cancelling, you should recover /usr/bin/mail. For example:

# cp -p /usr/bin/mail /usr/bin/mail.save
# echo "exit 0" > /usr/bin/mail
#
# cp -p /usr/bin/mail.save /usr/bin/mail

Most users use mailx for sending mails, so maybe no one would be affected by that work-around. Any way, you should be fast in doing so. Create a script that cancels all the relevant print jobs, in order to have a short period of time when /usr/bin/mail is changed.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

One method would be to rename the 'real' mail program to something like /usr/bin/mail0 and then create a wrapper for /usr/bin/bin. If would then examine ${PPID} do a ps -p ${PPID} | grep "cancel"; If the parent process were cancel then mail could simply exit 0 otherwise invoke the 'real' mail program passing along the argments supplied.

[Mark Greene_1]

Put the cancel into a script where you chown the jobs remaining in the queue (/var/spool/lp) to "nobody" or some other non-user and then cancel them. Then once a week or so review and delete the mail for that user account.

HTH
mark

[Unix Administrator_5]

I didnt see how you could change the ownership of a print job in the queue

[Frank Slootweg]

Building on the other responses, here is another hack:

You could edit /usr/bin/cancel to call your own (dummy) program instead of /usr/bin/mail. You will have to edit 'in place', i.e. your new path should be the same length or less than /usr/bin/mail. A very simple 'binary editor' can be realized with "vis -n", your favorite text editor and "inv -n".

I call this a hack instead of a solution, because of the above limitations and the fact that you have to redo this if /usr/bin/cancel is replaced by a newer version.

I did a quick search and found a late 2001 response from Bill Hassell saying this is a known, but not formally reported problem and advising to file an enhancement request. (Sorry, no URL. The ITRC search engine and I are not the best of friends, because I always only get *one* chance to look at *one* found document.)

[Cheryl Griffin]

This has already been submitted as an enhancement request:
ER# 5003416875 "add option to cancel(1) so that no mail is sent if cancelled by root" and was reviewed/worked on as recently as 02/12/2002. No ETA on its release as of yet.

We have a "SR Notify Database" that can keep track of the SR/ER and your contact information, so if you want to be notified when the release is fixed it would be best to log a support case so that we can add you to the database.

Cheryl