Toggle Printing Remotely using Dropbox

Lifehacker recently posted a way of printing files remotely using Dropbox. The original post can be found here.

I set this up on my machine and then realised that the script had to be running all the time. While it only uses a small amount of memory I decided to script a way to run the script remotely, and also to kill it when I had finished printing.

I have recently discovered Microsoft Powershell so decided to use it to create this script. There are two powershell scripts included in the zip below.

TogglePrinting.ps1

This is the main file. It checks for two files based within your Dropbox. If the ‘launch’ file is found, it launches the printing script. If the ‘kill’ file is found it kills all wscript processes. This could cause problems if you run other wscript processes for other reasons but I do not know if it is possible to identify the process that deals with the printing script.

scheduledtasks.ps1

This file creates a scheduled task that runs every 1/2 hour. It launches the TogglePrinting.ps1 powershell script.

Once you’ve set up the files in the necessary places all you need to do to enable printing is to create Print.LAUNCH or Print.KILL in the PrintQueue\Log folder and wait till your scheduled task runs again (on the hour and 1/2 hour). Once it’s launched you don’t need to re-launch it unless you have killed it (or rebooted your machine)

You can find the files here. Any comments/improvements are welcomed. Please let me know if you use the scripts too 🙂

I take no responsibility for any loss of data etc from using the scripts...
...but there shouldn't be any problems!