How To: Resume Held or Stalled Printer Jobs.

It's a fairly frequent occurrence: you've printed a document (to a network printer) only to find the printer was turned off. In this case, the print job would be set to a 'Hold' status. Using lpstat -l you can view the print job and you can resume it by using the lp command. So why not do all in single, simple script?

#!/bin/sh 

job=`lpstat | head -1 | cut -d' ' -f1` 

if [ "$job" = "" ] ; then    

    echo 1>&2 "No Print Jobs in Queue"    

    exit 1 

fi

echo "Resuming \"$job\"..." 

lp -i "$job" -H resume 

lpstat -l