cups-pdf : wish it could open when done

Its been something I always wanted in cups-pdf; to see the PDF output from the printing. Just to make sure that the printer didn't run out of ink!

After a bit of digging, I managed to get it working with inotify-tools. Here is what I had to do.

sudo apt-get install inotify-tools

inotify is one of the facilities in Linux that I adore. Very scalable; have used it extensively in production environment that fires a few thousand events per second (it is capable of doing a lot more).

For our purpose, we need to setup an event monitor and make the event do something; which is in our case monitor for write+close event, and ask gnome (in my case) to open the file. The best we can do is to run a background script on gnome session startup.

The script as below; make sure you set execute permission on the file.


#!/bin/bash

if [ "$1" != "-nohup-" ]; then
    nohup $0 "-nohup-" </dev/null &>/dev/null &
    exit 0;
fi

inotifywait -e close_write -m -r --format '%f' $HOME/PDF |
while read f; do
    nohup gnome-open $HOME/PDF/$f </dev/null &>/dev/null &
done