Windows Printer Driver to accept job but delete it and not print it

Question

I have a legacy application that is printing, and I cannot disable this in the application. This task prints to a Windows defined printer queue. The issue I run into is that without a real printer attached, eventually the print queue gets full and then the jobs that are printing stop, waiting for the queue to respond that the job was accepted.

The legacy application is printing via the Powershell scripting.

if( sm_control_flag )
{
    get-content $TO_PRINTER | Out-Printer -name $cfgs.PRINTER_QUEUE
}

The problem is that these scripts cannot be changed due to them being in production in distributed locations. There are a number of scripts that do this sort of process.

The Out-Printer needs to return a success, not an error, or the script will abort with a printing error. Therefore, the queue must exist (which is basically a printer defined in the Windows Server OS).

If there is not a real printer defined and attached to the queue, Windows will accept the job and queue the output to print. The issue is that the queue will eventually fill up the free space on the server, and then block all printing. The Powershell script's Out-Printer will also pause and wait for queue space to be freed up when the queue is full.

I cannot disable the printing on the computer and delete jobs, as other printers are connected and need to print. What I need is a printer driver that simply accepts the print job, but does nothing with it. I do not need it to print, just be deleted.

I was also trying to simply print to a file, so I could reuse same file name each time, which would overwrite the last print output, and meet my needs. The problem is that printing to a file always seems to prompt the user for the file name. This being a Windows server, there is no user to actually prompt for a file name from, so this blocks the queue and pauses the script as well.

Does anyone know of a way to accept the jobs and then simply delete the output and not print the job?

Answer 1

Open the Control Panel and choose Devices and Printers.

When the Device and Printers window opens, choose Add Printer. What comes next depends on your network and what edition of Windows you have, but you may need to choose The printer I want isn't listed.

At this point, you should be on a window with a radio button to Add a local printer or network printer with manual settings. Choose that option and then click Next.

From here, you can Use an existing port: and choose nul: (Local Port) from the drop down list.

Click Next again and now you can choose just about any printer driver you want, give the printer a name, and finish the setup.

The printer you just created will be a black hole on the system. It will process print jobs using the driver you selected, including clearing the job from the print queue, but the output will go nowhere.

Answer 2

strPort="<printer port name"
strNameSpace= "root\cimv2"
#the sql/wql query can be changed to go on other values.

#prepare to connect to a remote computer
Set oLocator = CreateObject("WbemScripting.SWbemLocator")
#connect to a remote computer 
#strUser local or domain admin username
#strPassword password for above
Set oService = oLocator.ConnectServer(strServer, strNameSpace, strUser, strPassword)
#Set administrator privileges
oService.Security_.impersonationlevel = 3
oService.Security_.Privileges.AddAsString "SeLoadDriverPrivilege"
#Query the internal representation of the printer
Set oPrinter=oService.ExecQuery("SELECT * FROM Win32_Printer where DeviceID like'"&strPort&"%'")
#alternative query option
#Set oPrinter=oService.ExecQuery("SELECT * FROM Win32_Printer where Name like'"&strPort&"%'")
#If you give the strPort and exact name only 1 printer will match
#It can match multiple printers if two printer have similiar names
# printer:  me-1 and me-2 with both be matched by strPort="me"
For Each Printer In oPrinter
#pause the printer
uResult = Printer.Pause()
#cancel all jobs
uResult = Printer.CancelAllJobs()
#if any error occures uResult will not be 0
if uResult <>0 then wscript.echo "Error occured"
Next

If you run the script on the computer with the print queue you may not need to have credentials.

Save as a vbs file cscript whatever.vbs