cancel -a (fastest way to lose a job, literally)

angelb angelb at bugarin.us
Fri May 18 13:29:13 PDT 2007


Hello all.

I noticed "cancel -a" removes all jobs for ALL printer queues at brute
force without regards to sex, color, origin, title, salary, etc.

Without additional control; ie, an argument or a confirmation, this
command is rather dangerous and just waiting for the unsuspecting
victim to come by.

How easy it is to just type "cancel -a", forgetting the que name, and
hit the ENTER key.

The following command would probably suffice if cancelling all jobs
from all printer queue is truly desired:

cupsclient# cancel -a ALL

If not, a confirmation should be displayed:

cupsclient# cancel -a
You're about to lose your job, are you sure?[y/n] n

Where n, would be the default and have the admin/user makes the
final decision.

While I don't see any reason, at the moment except for a sabotage :),
to delete all production jobs, this option to remove all jobs from ALL
printer queues is, IMHO, not necessary.

Is this something we could place in feature request?

Thanks,
Angel










More information about the cups mailing list