How to show the CUPS printer jobs history?

Question

I am printing some files from a remote computer to a network printer with the lpr command. It apparently worked, but some minutes later when I typed lpstat or lpq, the job had already disappeared, it had probably already printed the file. Is there a way to check the history or the log of my successfully completed jobs in the printer queue?

Answer 1

Yes a program exists: lpstat - print cups status information

$ lpstat -W completed

-W which-jobs
     Specifies which jobs to  show,  completed  or  not-completed  (the
     default).  This option must appear before the -o option and/or any
     printer names, otherwise the default (not-completed) value will be
     used in the request to the scheduler.

Or if you prefer via the following web pages:

https://localhost:631/printers/[NameOfPrinter]?which_jobs=completed
http://localhost:631/jobs?which_jobs=completed

Kind regards

Answer 2

The other answer when tried produced the following:

$ sudo lpstat -W completed
mfc-8480dn-1652         root              1024   Tue 28 Jan 2014 01:19:34 AM EST

Adding a user, saml gives you that user's history:

$ sudo lpstat -W completed -u saml | head -2
mfc-8480dn-1524         saml             23552   Thu 28 Nov 2013 10:45:44 AM EST
mfc-8480dn-1526         saml            699392   Sat 30 Nov 2013 10:34:34 AM EST

But the -u all mentioned in this U&L Q&A titled: View all user's printing jobs from the command line did nothing for me.

$ sudo lpstat -W completed -u all | head -2
$

Curiously I could do this:

$ sudo lpstat -W completed -u saml,root | head -3
mfc-8480dn-1524         saml             23552   Thu 28 Nov 2013 10:45:44 AM EST
mfc-8480dn-1526         saml            699392   Sat 30 Nov 2013 10:34:34 AM EST
mfc-8480dn-1652         root              1024   Tue 28 Jan 2014 01:19:34 AM EST

So one hackish way to do this would be to formalize a list of the users on your system and then add that as a subcommand to the -u argument like so:

$ sudo lpstat -W completed -u $(getent passwd | \
    awk -F: '{print $1}' | paste -sd ',')

Just to show that this sees all the users locally you can get a unique list of your users like so:

$ sudo lpstat -W completed -u $(getent passwd | \
    awk -F: '{print $1}' | paste -sd ',') | awk '{print $2}' | sort -u
ethan
root
sam
tammy

Issues?

One problem with this is if the user printing to CUPS does not have an account locally then they won't get displayed.

But if you have a directory that contains your LPD control files, typically it's /var/spool/cups, you'll notice a bunch of control files in there. These files are kept as a result of theMaxJobs` setting, which defaults to 500 when unset.

$ sudo ls -l /var/spool/cups/ | wc -l
502

Another source of usernames?

If you look through these files you'll notice that they contain usernames, and not just ones for accounts that are present on the system.

$ strings /var/spool/cups/* | grep -A 1 job-originating-user-name | head -5
job-originating-user-name
tammyB
--
job-originating-user-name
tammyB

So we could select all the entries that contain the username followed by the B.

$ sudo strings /var/spool/cups/* | grep -A 1 job-originating-user-name | \
    grep -oP '.*(?=B)' | sort -u
ethan
guest-AO22e7
root
sam
saml
slm
tammy

This list can then be adapted in the same way as we were originally using to take the list of users from getent passwd, like so:

$ sudo lpstat -W completed -u $(strings /var/spool/cups/* | \
    grep -A 1 job-originating-user-name | \
    grep -oP '.*(?=B)' |sort -u | paste -sd ',') 
mfc-8480dn-1525         tammy           545792   Thu 28 Nov 2013 01:36:59 PM EST
mfc-8480dn-1526         saml            699392   Sat 30 Nov 2013 10:34:34 AM EST
mfc-8480dn-1652         root              1024   Tue 28 Jan 2014 01:19:34 AM EST
mfc-8480dn-1672         saml              1024   Sun 09 Feb 2014 01:56:26 PM EST

References

• why is /var/spool/cups so huge?

Answer 3

I think /var/log/cups/page_log etc. has the history of completed jobs.

An alternative is the web interface

http://localhost:631/ 

which also shows completed jobs. I'm not sure where the web interface gets its information from.

Answer 4

Every answer above seems to be only interested in completed jobs...

What if you are also interested in jobs which were canceled by the user or an admin? What if you want to know how many jobs were aborted by the print system itself, due to driver or other problems?

For these cases use:

lpstat -W all -o

Also, you may want to know more details about each job. In this case add -l for a long output format:

lpstat -l -W all -o

Answer 5

If you want to see jobs of other users, than for some reason specifying -u without value works (at least on my system):

lpstat -W completed -u

Answer 6

This command appears to clear history as well as any active jobs:

sudo cancel -a -x