Changing the error policy on a CUPS printer


The default error policy for printers on CUPS (which Mac OS X uses, and which most Linux systems also use) is stop-printer.

You can see information about your printers and error policies by looking at the output of the printers.conf file with this terminal command:

sudo cat /etc/cups/printers.conf
If you want to get the actual printer name, though, run
lpstat -p
Here is an example of changing the policy of a printer to abort the job instead of stopping the printer:
/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p THE_name_of_your_printer -o printer-error-policy=abort-job
The other options are retry-current-job, retry-job, and the default stop-printer. You can read up more on those options and other CUPS printers.conf parameters in the official CUPS documentation.

I’ve also created a script that will change all installed printers to have the error policy be abort-job.


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