Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Stalled print job remover

I thought I better at least do one serious update this month to break up the craziness, and here it is...
Just saw this on Lifehacker and had the occasion to test it with excellent results.

If you are a Windows user you will have come across the situation were a print job fails but you are unable to remove it from the queue, this results in all the other jobs backing up and sometimes even a reboot will not get rid of the stuck job.

The manual way to fix this is as documented on the download site :

The Manual Process to Purge Stalled Print Jobs

  1. Make sure all print jobs are complete and that no new print jobs are being submitted.
  2. Double-click Services in the Printer Control Panel and stop the "Print Spooler" service.
  3. Open the C:WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\SPOOL\PRINTERS in My Computer.
  4. Delete all files located in this folder. Files in the Printers are named xxxx.spl, xxxx.shd where xxxx is a hexadecimal number. Files with .shd and .spl extensions are printer files.
  5. Double-click Services in the Control Panel and start the "Print Spooler" services.
  6. Re-print any print jobs.
This is fine if you can remember the process which isn't usually the case, that's were this little gui comes in.
Just install it and it will check the print queue and if it finds any stuck jobs it will automate the removal with a minimum of fuss. It is also portable so you can include it on your USB stick of tools.

Get it here

Linux users should check /var/spool/cups or var/spool/lpd for stuck print jobs and delete them accordingly.

Mac OSX users can do " cancel -a - " from a terminal (without the quotes). More info here

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