Authenticate Printer

Introduction

A simple C client that authenticates to a printer server using CUPS. It makes use of the following library: authenticate-printer-library.

Prerequisites

A C compiler
Make
CUPS

In some distributions the CUPS header files are in a package ~libcups2-dev

Compilation

First we clone the git submodule for the authenticate-printer-library from the root of this project:

git submodule init
git submodule update

We then compile the authenticate-printer-library:

cd authenticate-printer-library
make
cd ..

We then compile the client:

make

Running

To run the client, it is necessary to ensure that the system can find the shared library. For example, add to environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH the path to the shared library and store it in a shell initialization script, for example .bashrc:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/path/to/authenticate-printer/authenticate-printer-library

We can then run the program with:

./authenticate-printer

Typical usage

Typical usage is the following: First check whether the file is in A4 format:

pdfinfo file.pdf

If it is, we can check whether the printer is available with:

lpq

We then send the file to the printer:

lpr file.pdf

We then check whether the file is done processing. This is the case when the file jumps from rank “active” to rank “1st”:

lpq +5

With output something similar to:

myprinter is ready and printing
Rank    Owner   Job     File(s)                         Total Size
active  pieter  331     file.pdf                        151552 bytes
myprinter is ready
Rank    Owner   Job     File(s)                         Total Size
1st     pieter  331     file.pdf                        151552 bytes

At this point, we can authenticate the printer for multiple jobs with:

./authenticate-printer

We can then verify that the rank changes to “active” again with:

lpq +5

The program will exit when all documents have been processed.

pieterhijma / authenticate-printer