Cleaning up and starting over

You can clear and restart the print spooler.

This procedure completely clears and restarts the spooler system. All jobs currently queued for processing are deleted and must be resubmitted. Use it when you cannot troubleshoot an inoperative spooler. You must be the root user to perform this task.

  1. Stop the qdaemon:
    stopsrc -s qdaemon
  2. Stop associated processes:
    ps -ef | grep qd
    kill -9 PIDNumbers

    where PIDNumbers are PIDs resulting from the ps command. You may find qdfork.

  3. Stop associated processes:
    ps -ef | grep pio
    kill -9 PIDNumbers

    where PIDNumbers are PIDs resulting from the ps command. You may find pioformat or pioout.

  4. Clean out the queue and device status directory.
    rm /var/spool/lpd/stat/*_dev_*
    rm /var/spool/lpd/stat/s*
    The file /var/spool/lpd/stat/numfile contains an integer representing the last job number that was assigned. If it is satisfactory that the job numbering scheme restarts, enter:
    rm /var/spool/lpd/stat/*
  5. Remove spooled jobs:
    rm /var/spool/lpd/qdir/*
    rm /var/spool/qdaemon/*
  6. Restart the qdaemon.
    startsrc -s qdaemon

While issuing the ps commands, you may find a process whose parent process ID (PPID) is 1. If these processes cannot be killed by kill -9, you must reboot the system to delete these processes.