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Guide to Printers and Printing

Reallocating Printer Resources

Use the following procedures to avoid having one print job use all of the printer resources.

Note: Some commands may require root user or system group authority.
  1. Determine if a print job is using all resources in one of two ways:

    The lpq command, when entered without flags, reports the status of the default queue.

    The enq command enqueues a file to a shared resource, typically a printer (that is, it puts files into a queue for a particular resource). The -q flag displays the status of the default queue.

  2. Use one of the following commands to remove the job from the print queue (you must have root user authority to cancel jobs other than your own):

    In this example, the enq command uses the -x flag to cancel job number 21.

    In this example, the lprm command removes job number 42 from the lp0 printer queue, named with the -P flag. You can also remove jobs for a specific user by naming the user on the command line.

    In this example, the qadm command uses the -x flag to cancel all jobs on the lp0 printer.

    In this example, you can choose the By Print Queue option to cancel either all of a particular user's jobs or all jobs on a particular printer.

  3. Tell the sender of the print job to first divide it into smaller pieces by using the following split command, and then send the file as a series of jobs:

    split -50 bigfile
    

    The split command reads the specified file and writes it into segments to a set of output files. In the previous example, bigfile is split into 50-line segments named bigfileaa, bigfileab, bigfileac, and so forth.


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