How do I write a Windows 10 script to increment a counter by 1 each time a print job prints? - bash

Question

I'd like to write a script for Windows 10 to add 1 to a count in a .txt each time a print job completes. Ideally a separate count for each day, so I can see how many print jobs were completed in a day.
Any help in understanding how to go about this is appreciated!

Answer 1

The print service already logs every time it prints - you just need to enable the appropriate event log channel and consume the resulting log events:
# Enable the Microsoft-Windows-PrintService/Operational log channel
wevtutil.exe set-log Microsoft-Windows-PrintService/Operational /enabled:true
Now that the log channel is enabled, the print service will log an event with event ID 307 everytime it executes a local print job. Since the log events all have timestamps, getting a count per day is as simple as using the Group-Object cmdlet:
# Fetch the print job events from the event log
$printJobEvents = Get-WinEvent -FilterHashtable #{ LogName='Microsoft-Windows-PrintService/Operational'; EventId=307 }
# Group by date logged, to get a count-per-day
$printJobEvents |Group-Object { '{0:yyyy-MM-dd}' -f $_.TimeCreated.Date } -NoElement |Sort-Object Name

Answer 2

One technique that might be useful is to query stats for the spooler service like this:
Get-CimInstance 'Win32_PerfFormattedData_Spooler_PrintQueue' |
Format-Table -Property Name,Jobs,TotalJobsPrinted,TotalPagesPrinted -AutoSize
This gives output like this:
Name Jobs TotalJobsPrinted TotalPagesPrinted
---- ---- ---------------- -----------------
Printer1 0 50 212
Printer2 3 13 118
Printer3 1 33 306
_Total 4 96 636
The stats are reset each time the Print Spooler service restarts, so you'll need to take that into account in your final script, which might make this a trickier option than Mathias' event log solution.