PAC(8)

💅 PAC(8) — bestie's guide to printer/plotter accounting info

okay so. pac is the section 8 (system manager's manual) girlie you call when you need to know exactly how much paper everyone has been eating. no cap. 🖨️✨

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🌸 SYNOPSIS

pac [-cmrs] [-Pprinter] [-pprice] [user ...]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION

so basically, pac reads the printer/plotter accounting files and tallies up how much paper each named user has burned through — pages in the normal case, or feet if it's a raster device — then prints out how much each person consumed in pages or feet and in dollars. it's giving ✨receipts✨.

if you don't pass any user arguments, it prints the stats for every user who has used any paper. the whole roster, bestie. 👑

here are the options, and no we're not skipping a single one:

• -Pprinter — do the accounting for the printer named printer. normally it goes with the default printer (which is site dependent, iykyk) or whatever the environment variable PRINTER says.
• -c — sorts the output by cost. normally it's sorted alphabetically by name, but this is the main character switch. 💅
• -m — tells pac to ignore the host name in the accounting file. this is for when one user is on multiple machines and wants all their printing charges grouped together. slay, one bill, one vibe.
• -pprice — use price as the cost in dollars instead of the default of 0.02, or whatever price /etc/printcap says. not us negotiating, just saying. 🍓
• -r — reverse the sorting order. flip it and reverse it. 🔄
• -s — accounting info gets summarized onto the summary accounting file. this summarization is genuinely necessary because on a busy system the accounting file can grow by several lines per day. like it will not stop. 😭

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🌈 OUTPUT FORMAT

pac formats the output into a simple table with four columns:

1. the host name followed by the user's login name (column "Login"). if the -m option was specified, the host name is omitted. bye host name 🫶
2. the number of pages or feet printed (column "pages/feet").
3. the number of copies made (column "runs").
4. the total price for the user (column "price"). 💸

and if no user argument was given, pac will also print a summary line with the print totals. the grand finale. ⭐

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🎀 FILES

• /var/account/?acct — raw accounting files
• /var/account/?_sum — summary accounting files
• /etc/printcap — printer capability database

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🧚 SEE ALSO

• printcap(5)

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👑 HISTORY

the pac command appeared in 4.0BSD. it's been iconic since day one, fr fr.

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💀 BUGS

the relationship between the computed price and reality is as yet unknown. and honestly? that's the most real thing in this whole manpage. 🙈

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okay that's the whole page bestie, no notes, go check your paper usage. 🌸

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this cutie is from the Debian edition of the System Manager's Manual, dated May 31, 2007 — shoutout to the Debian girlies for keeping the receipts, mwah 💖