How to fix when you the error ‘You must be an administrator to delete this job’ when you can’t stop a print job

Joshua Dance
Nov 5, 2023

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Printed a few items, a few couldn’t print. Went to stop the job so they didn’t get out of order and got the weirdest error message

‘Unable to delete (or pause) X, you must be an administrator to delete this job’

I am an administrator, and I really need to stop this job… so I just unplugged the printer.

Did some research and found a short-term emergency fix, and the solution.

Emergency fix

Open Terminal and run the command cancel -a -x

This will delete any print jobs.

Long term fix

Open Settings > Printers > Select the printer > Turn on ‘Share this printer on this network’

Using these you can tell your printer

Found both of these solutions in this Reddit thread.

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