QVIEW

Section: User Commands (1)
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NAME

qview - printer queue viewer

SYNOPSIS

qview [ -S spooldir ] [ -Pprinter ] [ -s ] [ -n ] [ -l ] [ +interval ]

DESCRIPTION

Qview is a STDWIN-based application which continuously displays the status of a printer queue. It is intended as a replacement for lpq(1), continuously sitting in a corner of your display. In order to reduce the required screen ``real estate'', an optional compact listing format is available.

This is a single-window program; to monitor several printer queues simultaneous you must run separate copies for each printer, or circulate through the different queues using the Printers menu (see below).

COMMAND LINE OPTIONS

-S spooldir: Uses spooldir/printer instead of /usr/spool/printer to find the spool directory.
-Pprinter: Displays the queue for printer printer. The default is taken from the shell environment variable PRINTER; if this isn't set the default is lp.
-s: Displays a short, columnar listing. This only shows job number, size and owner for each job.
-n: Displays a normal listing, using one line per job. This shows the queue ordinal, control file name, owner, size and number of data files per job. This is the default.
-l: Displays a long listing, showing additional information for each data file.
+interval: Sets the number of seconds between window updates. The default is 30 seconds. This option must be last!

There may be other options which are processed by the particular implementation of STDWIN used.

SELECTING JOBS

A job may be selected by pointing at it with the mouse. The selected job is displayed highlighted; it is the target of certain commands (see below). The up and down arrow keys can also be used to select jobs. The selection is removed when the display is refreshed; to give you a chance to do something to the selected job, the display refresh is put off for at least 10 seconds when a selection has been made.

MENUS

Qview has three menus.

The Command menu contains the following items:

Delete job: Only enabled when a job has been selected (see above); this command deletes the job from the queue if allowed.
Move job to queue top: Only enabled when a job has been selected (see above); this command moves the job to the top of the queue if allowed (you must be root for this to work).
Restart daemon: Restart the printer daemon, if allowed. Use with caution; this can cause the current job to be killed and restarted.
Refresh display: Updates the display with fresh information (see below).
Set refresh interval...: Allows you to type the new time interval between display refreshes (the + option on the command line).
Quit: Exits the program.

The Format menu allows the current listing format to be changed between Short, Normal and Long. The current listing format is indicated with a tick mark or an asterisk.

The Printers menu shows the different printers available in the system, with the printer whose queue is currently shown checked. Choosing an entry causes the program to switch to that printer's queue.

DISPLAY REFRESHING

Normally the information is refreshed every interval seconds. It is also refreshed: when the window is resized, when the listing format is changed, when a different printer is chosen, when the Return key is pressed, or when Refresy display from the Quit menu is chosen. After such a forced refresh, the next refresh is scheduled in interval seconds.

DIAGNOSTICS

Panics if it can't chdir to the spool directory or can't create windows or menus.
Beeps if a command couldn't be executed.

FILES

/usr/spool/* spool directories

AUTHOR

Guido van Rossum

BUGS

Because it isn't suid daemon, it can't list remote queues like lpq can and it can't look in the control files. Because it can't look in the control files it uses a heuristic to find out which data files belong to a control file; this heuristic may fail and then it will lie about some jobs.
Instead of consulting /etc/printcap, it assumes the printer spool directory is /usr/spool/printer, except when printer is lp, in which case it knows the spool directory is /usr/spool/lpd.
Long format is unimplemented (shows identical sas normal format).
The display flashes at each refresh, even if the information displayed isn't changed.
Deleting takes extraordinary long because lprm seems to take forever; also lprm doesn't return a meaningful exit status so success or failure can't be reported.
The entries in the Printers menu are hardwirde in the program, except that any printer specified on the command line is added to the menu if it is not already in it.
I suspect that restarting a daemon frequently may cause it to hang.

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 09:07:13 GMT, February 14, 2025