Enabling or Disabling a Printer From Printing

The enable and disable commands control whether a printer prints or stops printing requests that are in the print queue. When you disable a printer, the printer stops printing requests in the queue. However, requests are still added to the queue. You must set the printer to reject print requests so that requests are not added to the queue. For information about rejecting print requests, see Accepting or Rejecting Print Requests.

A printer is enabled to print and accepts print requests when the printer is added by using Solaris Print Manager. Solaris Print Manager doesn't provide any additional printer processing management.

You must enable the printer whenever it has been disabled, which can happen when a printer fault occurs. When you enable a printer, it prints requests from the print queue until the queue is empty, even if the print service rejects additional requests for the print queue.

The following figure shows the point at which the processing of print requests is interrupted when a printer is disabled.

Figure 5–1 What Happens When a Printer Is Enabled or Disabled