Finding oldest print job

[Andy Torres]

I appended a solved thread. It was suggested I start a new one. Original is here: http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0xf01a543254bfd611abdb0090277a778c,00.html

I scripted a report that shows me the number of print jobs stacked up in our queues and how many of those are more than a day old. It's a nice report to get every morning to show general print server health.

What I'd really like to do is get a report of the one oldest job in each queue. If it's older than [whatever] days I can forward the list to our System Support department so they can investigate with our branches why their jobs aren't getting printed.

I've investigated using the find command on /var/spool/lp/[queue#] and lpstat options and it still eludes me.

Any ideas?

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

If you want to find the oldest control and data file pairs, something like this may work:

#!/usr/bin/sh

cd /var/spool/lp/request
PRINTERS=$(ls -1)

for P in PRINTERS
do
cd $P
OLDESTPAIR=$(ls -t c* d* | tail -2)
echo "Oldest files in $P are $OLDESTPAIR
cd ..
done

[Andy Torres]

It's spooky how quick the community is. Thanks, guys. I'm going to adopt the "ls -t with a tail" suggestion. Points forthcoming...

[Pete Randall]

See, Andy?

I told you this would work better - you got Patrick's answer 26 minutes before you asked the question. Now that's service!!!

Is that going to do it for you?

Pete

[Pete Randall]

Hi (again) Andy,

Thanks for accepting the suggestion.

Can you attach your existing script. That might be a good starting point.

Pete

[Andy Torres]

I just happened to notice this old thread and thought I'd post my solution.

We now do a find on the lp spool directory and cull the job number from the c-file name and basically rebuild the job number from the filenames, then xarg a cancel command to it. I managed to do it in one line. Here's the command. It cancels all jobs older than 14 days. We skip queue q0500. It's our VsiFax queue.

find /var/spool/lp/request/*/cA* -mtime +14 -exec ll {} \; | awk -F / '{print $6,$7}' | grep -v cannot | grep -v q0500 | sed 's/ cA/-/g' | cut -b 1-10 | xargs cancel

[Geoff Wild]

Interesting - here's how I do it:

lpstat -o |grep -v bytes|awk '$5ne"$M"{print $1}'|xargs cancel

That way I delete anything not in the current month - I run it on the 21st...

Rgds...Geoff

[Geoff Wild]

Sorry - forgot to mention that:

M=`date +%b`


Or just in oneline:

lpstat -o |grep -v bytes|awk '$5ne"`date +%b`"{print $1}'|xargs cancel

Rgds...Geoff

[Andy Torres]

That's a good one for monthly maintenance. Our print server is pretty busy. We have to keep it tamed daily. I should mention that our solution is fallible. We cron it daily. If any queue accumulates a large number of jobs in the 24-hour period the find command will hit that goofy "list too long" error and the cleanup fails. We then have to manually cancel the jobs in the queue so the cron job can complete. But otherwise, this is working well for us. I have it email a summary of cancelled jobs so I can be alarmed when it fails.

[Rick Garland]

Found this to be useful for keeping tabs on print jobs.

A perl script that will check the requests and send email for any print jobs over X hrs old.

Make a cron to run this daily/weekly/monthly and get the results.

Attached perl script

[Geoff Wild]

Rick - 20 points for that sweet script!!!

Very nice...

Rgds...Geoff

[Andy Torres]

Yes, very helpful script. Thanks for the help again, guys. Well-deserved points assigned.

[Andy Torres]

Just closing this thread so I don't have to keep checking back to assign future points.