printbilld - print billing/accounting/quote-generating daemon

printbilld [--stay]

printbilld printbilld is the server which does all of the hard work in the printbill(8) system. It is designed to be called from the printbill(1) print filter, which passes its (checked) command-line options to printbilld(1) via a Unix-domain socket, as a param=value list separated by semicolons and terminated by a newline. When printbilld has completed the processing of a job, it sends its return value (JSUCC or JREMOVE) back to printbill(1).

The most important option is the type parameter. If this is set to "bill", printbilld(1) checks if the user has a writable quote file with some non-zero quota, then calculates the bill, if the user can afford to print, the job is spooled to a secondary printer and JSUCC is returned to the printbill script (otherwise JREMOVE is sent and the job is not re-spooled). If it is set to "lazybill", printbilld immediately sends back JSUCC if the user has positive print quota, then bills the job and deducts from the user's remaining quota (if this goes negative the debt must be repayed before any further printing is possible). If the type is set to "account", no billing is done, but stats are calculated and recorded on a per-user and per-printer basis (as for the bill and lazybill). If set to "quote", the price is calculated and e-mailed and/or sent via "winpopup" (using smbclient) to the user. Note that if you want to use the smbclient method, you must edit your smb.conf file as described in printbillrc(5).

Please refer to printbill(8) for a comprehensive discussion of how printbill actually works.

Please see the accompanying README file for installation instructions. Chances are if you're reading this it's correctly installed.

printbill and the accompanying utilities were written by Daniel Franklin (d.franklin@ieee.org). The web interface was written by Daniel Franklin and Phil Ciufo (phil@snrc.uow.edu.au).

You can always grab the latest and greatest version from http://ieee.uow.edu.au/~daniel/software/printbill

printbill(1), printbill(8), printbill_configure(8), printbill_grapher(1), percentblack(1), percentcolour(1), percent_cmy(1), pqcheck(1), printquote(1), printbill_printer(1), printbillrc(5), printcap(5), pqm(8).