CUPS 2.0 lpstat and lpinfo commands return "Bad file descriptor"

Question

I have installed cups 2.0 on my Ubuntu box. I installed from source. When I type the first few commands in the CUPS manual it returns the message Bad file descriptor. Here is an example

VPCZ12V9E:~$ sudo lpinfo -m
lpinfo: Bad file descriptor
VPCZ12V9E:~$ lpstat -p
lpstat: Bad file descriptor

Please suggest why this is happening? It implies to me that I have a problem. I have not tried adding a printer yet. I have only installed CUPS 2.0.

Solution 1

Ensure also you have Started Cupsd Service

According to the ArchWiki (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CUPS), the service is called: org.cups.cupsd.service

Check the service by: sudo systemctl status org.cups.cupsd.service

Start (if not started) the service by: sudo systemctl start org.cups.cupsd.service

Enable the service (if not enabled) by: sudo systemctl enable org.cups.cupsd.service

Solution 2

I had the same error message. According to https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=185298 , make sure that /etc/cups/client.conf contains

ServerName /var/run/cups/cups.sock

Solution 3

Just leaving this here in case someone stumbles into the same problem as I did.

I'm running Debian Jessie, which has CUPS 2.0.3 and systemd. During some experiments the socket stopped working and I had the above symptoms. It was enough to systemctl restart systemd.socket, restarting cups was not enough. Also no config modification, as mentioned in the other answer was necessary.

Solution 4

In addition to the other solutions (which are all valid ones), it can happen when you upgrade your system kernel.

So one can also simply restart its system to ensure everything is right before investigating deeper.

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