lpstat should return failure when cupsd is not running

[Benjamin Kaduk]

We find ourselves needing to programmatically check whether cupsd is running (so that we can use lpadmin to add our site's printers for our users, but there are many other possible reasons one might want to do this). 'lpstat -r' seems the obvious way to do so, but the command always returns zero (success).
Thus, we are forced to parse the text output of 'lpstat -r', which is quite fragile to that text changing in a future release. 'lpstat -r' should return nonzero when cupsd is not running, allowing for a robust determination of whether cupsd is running (and thus other commands will fail).

This bug was observed in natty, with cups 1.4.6-5ubuntu1.3

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

Checking for presence of the file /var/run/cups/cupsd.pid to find out if cups is running is more robust in my opinion.

Anyway if you think lpstat -r needs to return nonzero value if cups isn't running this should be reported upstream to CUPS here:
http://www.cups.org/str.php
Please also add a link to the upstream str in this bug report.

[gf (gf-interlinks-deactivatedaccount)]

Hello Benjamin,
Thank you for submitting this feature/enhancement request for the cups package. You made this request quite some time ago and Ubuntu has been updated since then.

Do you think this feature/enhancement is still needed or can we close this bug report?

Thank you again for helping make Ubuntu better.
G
[Ubuntu Bug Squad volunteer triager]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for cups (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]