Print Monitoring

I’m certain this has been asked before, but I couldn’t narrow my search fields down enough to locate it, so here it:

I would like to keep track of how many pages have been printed. Basically, monitor Print Utility and update a tiny file every time a page is printed.

If someone could point me in the right direction, I can probably finish the rest on my own.

Mucho Thanxo,
-Rob

By the way, the printer(s) in question are standard post script compatible laser printers. So, if there’s a unix command to query the printer and find out how many pages it has printed, that would be equally useful.

-Rob

Unix already keeps track of that for you in a tiny file.

/var/log/cups/page_log

Here’s an example:

After the user name you’ll find the unique job id and after the date/time, the first number corresponds with the page sent to the printer for that job. In the example above, job 172 had 4 pages, 173 had 2.

You could read this and tally the page counts by printer, or just read it using Console.