delete old print jobs

[Amy Tanner]

>
>
> > I'm afraid, I can't right now re-call or find some old link to a cool
> > article which showed how to use some commandline params to tell "date"
> > to show the date of N days ago.
>
> Aahhh.... found it. With GNU date, you can use it in the form
>
>    date -d "DATESTRING"
>
> where DATESTRING may be things like:
>
>   yesterday
>   tomorrow
>   1 day ago
>   3 month ago
>   3 months ago
>   4 year ago
>   5 years 8 months 7 days 12 hours ago
>
> That means you can do this to print the date 5 days ago:
>
>   date -d "5 days ago"
>
> But you don't want the timezone info, right? OK then:
>
>   date -d "5 days ago" "+%a %d %Y"
>
> Now for the full command:
>
>   lpstat -o \
>   |egrep -v "($(date -d "5 days ago")\
>              |$(date -d "4 days ago")\
>              |$(date -d "3 days ago")\
>              |$(date -d "2 days ago")\
>              |$(date -d "1 days ago"))" \
>   |while read job_id restofline; do sudo cancel $job_id; done

I just finally got back to this project and saw your post.  For anyone else who may find this useful, here's the script I wrote:

#!/bin/sh
# This script deletes jobs from print queue from 5-30 days old

x="5"
while [ $x -lt 30 ]; do
    lpstat -o|egrep "($(date -d "$x days ago" "+%d %b %Y"))"|
        while read job_id restofline; do
            cancel $job_id
            echo "$(date) Deleted job id: $job_id" >> /var/log/cups/cleanqueue_log
        done
    x=$[$x+1]
done



Thank you for all your help.