How to monitor printing using cups or lpd
 

I have a requirement to print to network printers and monitor printer status and print job progress.

I am looking at doing it via cups or lpd commands.
Does anyone have any experience in doing this?

There's a rather nice Nagios plugin that is actually just a script called check_cups_queue. You can run it from command line so don't actually need to run Nagios to use it:

http://exchange.nagios.org/directory..._queue/details

Of course since it is a script you can read what it is doing and use that as the basis for any more intensive checking you want to do.