Ubuntu – How to permanently delete networked printers

You have three options:

• Take any printer and hook it up to an always-on PC. The PC will be the printer server, and needs to be set up to allow printer sharing, as shown in the first part of Takkat's reply. (The client part is more or less the same independent of which printer sharing option you use.)
• Take any printer and hook it up to a hardware mini print server, as suggested by Kendor. This kind of printer server is much smaller than a PC, it's basically just a USB port for the printer plus a network card. (Image courtesy Netgear.)

• Lastly, buy a printer with a network card included, then you don't need a separate print server. Look for a printer with either WiFi or Ethernet. For example in the Newegg advanced search, search for printers with network ports.

Plain printing tends to work with many/most combinations of printer and OS.

But if you have/buy a multifunction printer, using the scanner over the network can be tricky. If network scanning is one of your requirements, make sure to get a product that works for your particular setup (i.e. where you can get drivers that support it for all the operating systems you use). I believe mini-print servers are out of the question in this scenario.

Using this command: lpstat -a we can see the installed printers and identify the name of the desired printer to keep, we can use the grep command also to filter the results like so: lpstat -a | grep <probable_name_of_printer>.

Then this little script can help:

1. Run this command to check that the desired printer is not listed:

   lpstat -a | cut -d" " -f1 | sed -E '/<NAME_OF_PRINTER>/d' | grep <NAME_OF_PRINTER>
   

   • This should return nothing as it does the following:

     • lpstat -a: list installed printers
     • cut -d" " -f1: return only the names of the printers
     • sed -E '/<NAME_OF_PRINTER>/d': remove the name of the printer to keep from the output of the previous commands
     • grep <NAME_OF_PRINTER>: make sure the desired printer is not on the list

2. If the above checks out; then run this command to remove every other printer that you don't need:

   sudo bash -c 'for i in $(lpstat -a | cut -d" " -f1 | sed -E '/<NAME_OF_PRINTER>/d'); do lpadmin -x "$i"; done'