Clear or Cancel Any PENDING Jobs

[SemAiSoft]

I think this is a much needed feature: Ability to cancel pending jobs, contrary to the existing feature of just cleaning up cancelled or completed jobs. Is it viable?

[esimkowitz]

I haven't invested in this because the main system I've been developing this for flushes its pending job queue to the printer almost immediately, at which point I can't use CUPS to cancel the job. I probably don't have the bandwidth to support this myself, but I'm always open to submissions!

[SemAiSoft]

Quite right, I solved momentarily with the below code snippets - but then I encounter the native module path resolution inconsistent behaviour, where the same given path won't resolve on resolve on some window os - even if the path exists check is truthy at the same time.

The JOB CANCELLING code:

import os from "node:os";

import { exec } from "node:child_process";
import { promisify } from "node:util";

const execAsync = promisify(exec);

export async function cancelAllPrinterJobs(
  name?: string,
  displayName?: string,
): Promise<void> {
  const platform = os.platform();

  switch (platform) {
    case "win32":
      await cancelWindowsJobs(name, displayName);
      break;

    case "linux":
    case "darwin":
      await cancelCupsJobs(name, displayName);
      break;

    default:
      throw new Error(`Unsupported platform: ${platform}`);
  }
}

async function cancelWindowsJobs(
  name?: string,
  displayName?: string
): Promise<void> {
  let cmd = "";
  let cmd2 = "";

  if (displayName || name) {
    cmd =
      `powershell -NoProfile -Command "` +
      `Get-PrintJob -PrinterName '${escapePowerShell(
        name || ''
      )}' | Remove-PrintJob"`;
    cmd2 =
      `powershell -NoProfile -Command "` +
      `Get-PrintJob -PrinterName '${escapePowerShell(
        displayName || ''
      )}' | Remove-PrintJob"`;
  } else {
    cmd =
      `powershell -NoProfile -Command "` +
      `Get-Printer | ForEach-Object { ` +
      `Get-PrintJob -PrinterName $_.Name | Remove-PrintJob ` +
      `}"`;
  }

  await execAsync(cmd);
  await execAsync(cmd2);
}

async function cancelCupsJobs(
  name?: string,
  displayName?: string
): Promise<void> {
  // Get all queued jobs
  const { stdout } = await execAsync("lpstat -o");

  if (!stdout.trim()) {
    return;
  }

  const lines = stdout
    .trim()
    .split("\n")
    .map(v => v.trim())
    .filter(Boolean);

  for (const line of lines) {
    /**
     * Example:
     * XPrinter-123 username 1024 Thu 23 May 2026 ...
     */
    const jobId = line.split(/\s+/)[0];

    if (!jobId) {
      continue;
    }

    // If filtering by printer
    if (
      (displayName || name) &&
      (!jobId.startsWith(`${displayName}-`) || !jobId.startsWith(`${name}-`))
    ) {
      continue;
    }

    try {
      await execAsync(`cancel ${shellEscape(jobId)}`);
    } catch {
      // Ignore individual failures
    }
  }
}

function shellEscape(value: string): string {
  return `"${value.replace(/"/g, '\\"')}"`;
}

function escapePowerShell(value: string): string {
  return value.replace(/'/g, "''");
}

[esimkowitz]

If you're just invoking shell commands why are you encountering native module path resolution issues?