NAME

pac —

printer/plotter accounting information

SYNOPSIS

pac [-Pprinter] [-c] [-m] [-pprice] [-s] [-r] [name ...]

DESCRIPTION

The pac utility reads the printer/plotter accounting files, accumulating the number of pages (the usual case) or feet (for raster devices) of paper consumed by each user, and printing out how much each user consumed in pages or feet and dollars.

Options and operands available:

-Pprinter: Accounting is done for the named printer. Normally, accounting is done for the default printer (site dependent) or the value of the environment variable PRINTER is used.
-c: Cause the output to be sorted by cost; usually the output is sorted alphabetically by name.
-m: Cause the host name to be ignored in the accounting file. This allows for a user on multiple machines to have all of his printing charges grouped together.
-pprice: The value price is used for the cost in dollars instead of the default value of 0.02 or the price specified in /etc/printcap.
-r: Reverse the sorting order.
-s: Accounting information is summarized on the summary accounting file; this summarization is necessary since on a busy system, the accounting file can grow by several lines per day.
names: Statistics are only printed for user(s) name; usually, statistics are printed for every user who has used any paper.

FILES

/var/account/?acct: raw accounting files
/var/account/?_sum: summary accounting files
/etc/printcap: printer capability data base

HISTORY

The pac utility appeared in 4.0BSD.

BUGS

The relationship between the computed price and reality is as yet unknown.