[cups.development] Getting printer/job status and print completion

[Michael Sweet]

On Sep 28, 2010, at 4:26 AM, John Dunn wrote:
> Does CUPs support any method of getting the status of the printer or a job. Does it support getting a list of jobs which have been completed?
> 
> Basically I want to be able to
> 
> 1. Submit a job to a printer via CUPS
> 2. Check the status of the printer(Is it idle, printing or in error)
> 3. Get a list of jobs for the printer and their status(queued,printing, number of pages printed)
> 4. Get a list of jobs that have recently completed printing
> 
> Is this possible with CUPS?


Some of this is possible using the Berkeley and System V commands, however much of the functionality of CUPS (and IPP) is not exposed at the command-line.

You can write small C/C++ programs to do what you want using the CUPS API; there are Python (available from Red Hat) and PHP (included with CUPS) mappings of this API as well.

Finally, CUPS 1.5 (currently in development) includes a greatly enhanced version of ipptool that allows you to send arbitrary IPP requests and get the responses in different formats - I've been posting snapshots of this program on the download page:

    http://www.cups.org/software.php

________________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer, PWG Chair