Stop CUPS Printing Service Guide

Stop CUPS Printing Service Guide | Generated by AI

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Question: What is cups.service/stop in Ubuntu?

Answer:

cups.service/stop refers to stopping the CUPS printing service on Ubuntu using systemd (the most common way to control services).

What is CUPS?

CUPS stands for Common UNIX Printing System. It is the standard printing system on Ubuntu (and most Linux distributions, as well as macOS).
It handles:

Managing local and network printers
Processing print jobs
Printer discovery (especially via cups-browsed)
The web interface for printer administration (http://localhost:631)

The systemd service is called cups.service and runs the main CUPS daemon (cupsd).

What does `cups.service/stop` mean?

It means executing the command to immediately stop the CUPS service.

The actual command is:

sudo systemctl stop cups.service

(or shorter: sudo systemctl stop cups)

What happens when you stop it?

The CUPS daemon (cupsd) is terminated.
No new print jobs can be sent or processed.
Pending jobs in the queue usually stay in the queue (they resume after restart).
Printer discovery / auto-adding of network printers stops (if using cups-browsed).
The CUPS web interface (port 631) becomes unavailable.
Printing from applications fails until the service is started again.

Purpose	Command	Notes
Stop CUPS now	`sudo systemctl stop cups`	Immediate stop
Start CUPS	`sudo systemctl start cups`	-
Restart CUPS	`sudo systemctl restart cups`	Most common when troubleshooting
Prevent start on boot	`sudo systemctl disable cups`	Still can be started manually
Allow start on boot again	`sudo systemctl enable cups`	-
Check status	`sudo systemctl status cups`	Shows running/stopped + recent logs
Stop + disable (no auto-start)	`sudo systemctl stop cups` `sudo systemctl disable cups`	Common on servers

Note about modern Ubuntu versions (22.04+ / 24.04+):
Sometimes CUPS is delivered as a snap package (especially cups and cups-browsed). In that case systemctl may not work and you need:

sudo snap stop cups
sudo snap disable cups

Check which version you have with:

systemctl status cups.service
# or
snap list | grep cups

References:

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