[cups] CUPS basic accounting

[sawbona at xsmail.com]

Hello:

On 20 Mar 2020 at 19:13, Helge Blischke wrote:

> ... I´d suggest to use a Perl or Python script ...
I have not found simple Perl/Python scripts to do what I need.

With some help from those who know more about awk and such than me, I 
have managed to parse the sum of all printed pages from the
/var/log/cups/page_log file by running this awk stanza ...

[code]
awk '/groucho/{pages += $7} END {print pages}' /var/log/cups/page_log
[/code]

... against this log output:

---
Samsung_M2020_Series groucho 100 [21/Dec/2018:08:38:25 -0300] 5 1 -
localhost Leafpad job #1 - -
---

I manually checked the result by tallying all print jobs (!) and the
result was correct.

What I would now like to do is reduce the log file's content as there
being one user and one printer, I really do not need to know which 
printer is active or which user is doing the printing.

Nor do I need to log the *full* time, just date and time without the 
GMT offset is more than enough.

> ... the page_log entries is highly configurable, I think there are
> very few ...
Quite so.

I have seen a couple of scripts/apps but they seem to be quite 
complex, oriented more to network printing, billing, printing caps, 
etc.

It seems that I am on the default setting for how the page_log is
formatted and that "The PageLogFormat directive in the cupsd.conf(5) 
file can be used to change this information." but I have not found 
instructions on how to set it and also read that it has been 
deprecated.

[url]
https://manpages.debian.org/experimental/cups-daemon/cupsd.conf.5.en.h
tml
[/url]

Besides that, the page referenced above says that "The default is the
empty string, which disables page logging" but I *am* getting a full
default log but cannot find where it is set.

Any idea as to how I can modify the default to PageLogFormat to get 
just the data I want?

Thanks in advance,

G.