How to view a network print queue status

If a document that you sent to a network printer has not printed yet, you can investigate what happened to your print job by reviewing the status of the print queue.

Method 1 - View CUPS GUI from a web browser

  1. Launch your preferred web browser (e.g. Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, etc.)
  2. Enter the following URL: http://printhost.math.ias.edu:631/printers/
  3. Click on the name of the network printer you want to check.
  4. You are given two options for viewing the network print queue status:
  • Clicking on Active jobs will show you what job are currently printing.
  • Clicking on Show Completed Jobs to show what jobs have finished printing.

Method 2 - Command Line Interface (CLI)

To view the print queue information for any of our network printers, use the command lpq. To view the queue on printer s0d, use the following:

help@london[4]: lpq -Ps0d 
Printer: s0d@localhost 'simonyi-0-duplex'  
Queue: 2 printable jobs  
Server: pid 15753 active  
Unspooler: pid 15754 active  
Status: waiting for subserver to exit at 13:41:35.420  
Filter_status: 87 percent done at 13:41:00.303  
Rank   Owner/ID                  Class Job Files                 Size Time 
stalled(676sec) guest@zurich+50     A    50 AHLMcT.pdf          288091
13:30:23 2      help@localhost+151           A   151 filename.ps               5596 13:41:35

To view the queue on your default printer, use:

help@london[5]: lpq 
Printer: s0d@localhost 'simonyi-0-duplex'  
Queue: 2 printable jobs  
Server: pid 15753 active  
Unspooler: pid 15754 active  
Status: waiting for subserver to exit at 13:41:35.420  
Filter_status: getting end using 'pjl job/eoj' at 13:42:31.647  
Rank   Owner/ID                  Class Job Files                 Size Time 
stalled(799sec) guest@zurich+50     A    50 AHLMcT.pdf          288091
13:30:23 2      help@localhost+151           A   151 filename.ps               5596 13:41:35

How to remove a print job from the command line interface (CLI):

If you want to remove your job, you need to know the job id. Looking at the above output we see that the job number is 151. We can now remove that job with the lprm command:

help@london[6]: lprm 151  
Printer s0d@localhost:   checking perms 'help@localhost+151'   
dequeued 'help@localhost+151'

The job is now removed from the print queue. If we wanted to remove all our jobs from the printer s0d, we could have used:

help@london[6]: lprm -Ps0d