This often occur when you may accidentally send a real big job to the printer, and then you realize that, you forgot to change the paper size from A4 to letter, or any other scenario where you may need to change something in a document already sent to the printer queue, so now you need to cancel it.
So first lets see the spooler (Printer queue)
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lpq
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This will list all your jobs sent to the printer.
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BJC-250 is ready
Rank Owner Job File(s) Total Size
1st mylinuxlogin 248 (stdin) 0 bytes
2nd mylinuxlogin 249 (stdin) 0 bytes
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Now if you want to stop jobs, you can use the cancel command.
You can cancel only jobs owned by you, or by an specified user (provided that you have the rights to do it).
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cancel -u user
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This will cancel all jobs belonging to a certain user,
but, if you want to cancel all jobs, no matter who owns them
use this command.
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cancel -a
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lpq Command
lpq - show printer queue status
Synopsis
lpq [ -E ] [ -P dest ] [ -a ] [ -l ] [ +interval ]
Description
lpq shows the current print queue status on the named printer. Jobs queued on the default destination will be shown if no printer or class is specified on the command-line.
The interval option allows you to continuously report the jobs in the queue until the queue is empty; the list of jobs is show one every interval seconds.
The -E option forces encryption when connecting to the server.
The -a option reports jobs on all printers.
The -l option requests a more verbose (long) reporting format.
