How do I tell when a CUPS print jobs has been completed plus info about that job?

Question

I need to know each time a Mac print job is created/completed, plus some information about that job (what was printed, pages, copies, etc).

The best method I've come up with thus far is to use kqueue() on /var/spool/cups/ and then parse the c##### files as they're created, but I'm wondering if there's a better way.

This might get more responses on serverfault.com – Ben S Sep 17 '09 at 17:35 — Ben S, Sep 17 '09 at 17:35

tvanfosson · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-17T18:00:16.257

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I'd think about creating a filter that you can put into the CUPS pipeline that collects this information and stores it for you (say in a database). Then you can access the database to get the information using any standard database access mechanism. Basically the filter is just a command-line program that gets a number of parameters passed to it from CUPS and needs to read input on stdin and write it to stdout. You can find more information at http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/api-filter.html.

edited Sep 17 '09 at 18:00

answered Sep 17 '09 at 17:53

tvanfosson

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I like this idea a lot. Any ideas on how I could tell when a job had been canceled using this route? – Redwood Sep 17 '09 at 22:14
I think that there are some methods to communicate with the backend. I haven't actually implemented a filter for CUPS, though I did work on some LPR filters back in the day. See the section on communicating with the backend. You'd have to be working with a backend that writes device status back to the filter, but I would think that most do so that page counting software can easily hook into it and do the right thing. – tvanfosson Sep 17 '09 at 23:14

Kurt Pfeifle · Answer 2 · 2010-06-10T15:33:10.773

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Have you ever looked what the page_log file provides for you? There's a man page providing details about its format. Recent versions of CUPS will let you configure the amount of info logged in that file.

edited Jun 10 '10 at 15:33

answered Jun 05 '10 at 21:00

Kurt Pfeifle

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 09 '18 at 03:38

Have you looked into the IPP subscription schemes supported by CUPS?

These could trigger a mailto: or an rss: notification upon certain print system events. The IPP operations related to this topic are:

Create-Job-Subscriptions, Create-Printer-Subscriptions, Create-Resource-Subscriptions, Create-System-Subscriptions

Details about this feature are in the CUPS Programming Manual:

https://www.cups.org/doc/cupspm.html

How do I tell when a CUPS print jobs has been completed plus info about that job?

3 Answers3