The printer is idle
There are several reasons why
you might find a printer idle and enabled
but with print requests still queued for it:
-
The print requests need to be filtered.
Slow filters run one at a time
to avoid overloading the system.
Until a print request has been filtered
(if it needs slow filtering),
it will not print.
Use the following command
to see if the first waiting request
is being filtered.
lpstat -l -o
-
The printer has a fault.
After a fault has been detected,
printing resumes automatically, but not immediately.
The print service
waits about five minutes before trying again
and continues trying
until a request is printed successfully.
You can force a retry immediately by enabling the printer
as follows:
enable printer-name
-
A dial-out printer is busy or does not answer,
or all dial-out ports are busy.
As it does following a fault,
the print service waits five minutes
before trying to reach a dial-out printer again.
If the dial-out printer cannot be reached
for an hour or two (depending on the reason),
the print service
finally alerts you to a possible problem.
You can force a retry immediately
by enabling the printer as follows:
enable printer-name
Next topic:
The lpstat -o command hangs
Previous topic:
Wrong character set or font
© 2004 The SCO Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
UnixWare 7 Release 7.1.4 - 22 April 2004