# Warn users above print quota with warnpykota

Last modified on $Date: 2006-04-07 22:34:44 +0200 (Fr, 07. Apr 2006) $

Whenever a user tries to print a document, if he is over his print quota, then the job is refused. Depending on PyKota's configuration, especially the `mailto` option, he and/or the administrator may eventually receive an email message which explains the situation and invites him to solve the problem before being allowed to print again.

However this may not be sufficient, and you may want to warn users who have reached their print quota at regular intervals, like every day, for example from a cron job.

This may be useful if the user has reached his print quota, and have received an email message telling him so, but then he doesn't print for some days and may forget to fix the problem, by buying more paper for example.

The `warnpykota` command was written with this in mind. If you put this command in your `crontab`, launching it for example every day, then you'll be sure that all your users who are above their print quota will not forget it ! Of course they may delete the messages without having read them, but at least they won't be able to say that they didn't receive them ;-)

When an user who is not a PyKota administrator launches this command, only him can receive a warning message. He can specify a printer name's filter to check his quota only on specific printers. If a normal user uses the `--groups` command line argument, then for each group he is a member of in the print quota database, each group member may receive a warning message. You can take care of this if this becomes annoying by forbidding normal users to launch the `warnpykota` command.

PyKota administrators can pass additionnal user or group names (or wildcard filters) to only check the users or groups whose name matches.

## Reference

            warnpykota
            -v--version
            -h--help
            -u--users
            -g--groups

              -P printername
              --printer printername

              name1
              name2
              ...
              nameN