while true loop

[Norman_21]

hi guys,

I've written the following script to cancel a printer jobs queue but the script keeps prompting asking for an input again:

while true
do
echo "enter printer name ?\c"
read ANSW
cancel -e $ANSW
done

appreciate you advise and support..

[Patrick Wallek]

Yeah, that's what the while-true construct does.

To get out of that loop you'll have to do a CTRL-C

What exactly do you want the script to do? Do you want it to execute once? Do you want it to prompt the user before it executes again?

We need more info before we can effectively help you.

[Balaji N]

Hi,
The read statement is inside the while loop and hence as long as the while loop is true, it will prompt you for the input. Take the read statement out of the while loop.

BTW, what exactly are you trying. If you just need to cancel the jobs of a specific printer, just take away the loop and execute the rest of the commands.

Regards
Balajio

[Balaji N]

Hi,
The read statement is inside the while loop and hence as long as the while loop is true, it will prompt you for the input. Take the read statement out of the while loop.

BTW, what exactly are you trying. If you just need to cancel the jobs of a specific printer, just take away the loop and execute the rest of the commands.

Regards
Balaji

[Patrick Chim · Accepted solution]

Hi,

You can modify your script like this,

while true
do
echo "enter printer name ?\c"
read ANSW
if [ x"$ANSW" = "x" ]
then
echo "program exit"
exit
fi
cancel -e $ANSW
done

If you just press "enter" at the question, the program will quit !!

Regards,
Patrick

[S.K. Chan]

If you want to cancel everything in all of the printer queue you can do this ..

for printername in $(lpstat|grep \^printer|awk '{print $4}')
do
cancel -e $printername
done

This command extract all the printername configured in your system.
$ lpstat|grep \^printer|awk '{print $4}'

Not sure if this is what you want.

[Norman_21]

Hi guys,

I realy appreciate your prompt reply. However, I was not sure if I removed the loop
the script will cancel the whole bunch of a specific printer jobs. I'll try and see what happens?

[Balaji N]

Hi,
From the man pages of cancel.

-e Empty the spool queue of all requests for each printer.
Only users with appropriate privileges can use this
option.


So, if ur root and run cancel -e , it will cancel all requests.

HTH
-balaji

[Norman_21]

Closed...