Print queue check script

So on Thursday I was manually cleaning out the print queue on a CUPS print server, 40+ jobs one at a time, and it came to me! Just whip up a quick sys-admin script that polls, the data from a column and just deletes it from there. What I didn't think to do, was READ the manpage on lprm. Had I read the man page instead of re-creating the wheel, I would have realized that in order to remove all print jobs from a CUPS queue for a specific printer, just add a - to the commandline for the printer.



Needless to say, I wrote the script anyway. Im sure I can pilfer bits and pieces of it for another quick script later.



#!/bin/bash
### Removes Print jobs from the print queue
### Command:

#Query printer for print queue, then drop data to jobid file
lpq -P $1 awk '{print $3}' > jobid

# remove all print jobs from specified printer
cat jobid xargs lprm

# Query printer queue again and let admin know that the jobs have been removed
lpq -P $1
echo 'Print jobs removed'

# remove temp file
rm -rf jobid