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

Michael Sweet mike at easysw.com
Fri May 18 19:35:25 PDT 2007


angelb wrote:
> 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?

Yeah, go ahead.  This is no different than "rm -rf /" and other
similarly "destructive" commands, though, but I'm OK with adding
a confirmation prompt.

(FWIW, you have to be an admin to run cancel -a...)

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Publishing Software        http://www.easysw.com




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