System Management Guide: Operating System and Devices

Showing Printer Usage

You can display printer or plotter usage accounting records with the pac command.

To collect printer usage information, you must have an accounting system set up and running. See Setting Up an Accounting System for guidelines.
The printer or plotter for which you want accounting records must have an acctfile= clause in the printer stanza of the /etc/qconfig file. The file specified in the acctfile= clause must grant read and write permissions to the root user or printq group.
If the -s flag of the pac command is specified, the command rewrites the summary file name by appending _sum to the path name specified by the acctfile= clause in the /etc/qconfig file. This file must exist and grant read and write permissions to the root user or printq group.

To display printer usage information for all users of a particular printer, type:
```
/usr/sbin/pac -PPrinter
```
If you do not specify a printer, the default printer is named by the PRINTER environment variable. If the PRINTER variable is not defined, the default is lp0.
To display printer usage information for particular users of a particular printer, type:
```
/usr/sbin/pac -PPrinter User1 User2 ...
```

The pac command offers other flags for controlling what information gets displayed.