Quick Tip: Enable a Paused Printer in Cups

My HP Printer sometimes has an issue where after printing once the printer becomes unavailable. In system-config-printer – it shows up as paused, using lpstat-p on the command line shows it as disabled.

In my case, at least, restarting cups did nothing to resolve the problem, though restarting the whole system has sometimes worked.

The solution I found was to useĀ lpstat -p to find the name of the printer and verify its status there. The output I got was:

printer Home disabled since Thu 11 May 2017 10:55:02 AM PDT –
reason unknown
printer PDF is idle. enabled since Mon 27 Mar 2017 02:23:42 PM PDT

The “Home” printer is the one I want to start up again, which was done with this command: cupsenable Home

Now, the lpstat-p returns the following:

printer Home is idle. enabled since Thu 11 May 2017 11:07:06 AM PDT
printer PDF is idle. enabled since Mon 27 Mar 2017 02:23:42 PM PDT

and in the system-config-printer gui, it shows as ready, and will print without issue.

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