Mass abort Queued APEX Jobs

I ran into an issue the other day while trying to deploy to an org with a lot of ongoing activity. I ran into the annoying error message:

Error: Apex class has Batchable or Future jobs pending or in progress
 (line 1, column 21)

I checked the Apex Jobs queue and found that there was over 5500 queued jobs. Some which had been waiting for hours. I decided to clear the queue so that I could continue with the deployment. I wrote a quick APEX script to mass abort all the queued jobs which I then executed using annonymous APEX.

When working with the Apex Jobs queue I believe it’s quicker to review it using a DB-tool (like force.com IDE – explore, Force.com explorer or why not force CLI). This way you can simply filter and sort to get to what you need without needing to configure any views.

The snipped I used can be found below – the two first lines are there to be used instead of line three if it is only jobs from one specific class I want to mass remove from the queue.

//ApexClass apxClass = [SELECT Id FROM ApexClass WHERE Name = 'myScriptName'];
//List<AsyncApexJob> lstJobs = [SELECT Id FROM AsyncApexJob WHERE Status = 'Queued' AND ApexClassId = :apxClass.Id];
List<AsyncApexJob> lstJobs = [SELECT Id FROM AsyncApexJob WHERE Status = 'Queued'];

for(AsyncApexJob job : lstJobs) {
   try {
       System.abortJob(job.Id);
   } catch(Exception ex ) {
        System.debug(ex);
    }
}

This blog post is a repost from Martin’s old blog called webaholic.