Guys im trying to create a script that will load ballance 3 devices. Unix is still very alien to me having only been in this position for 3 months now. Not to mention the fact that i've been thrown in the deep end. Anyway so far i've managed to make a script that looks at all 4 devices and make a report:

ls ~/Desktop/printer1/ ~/Desktop/printer2/ ~/Desktop/printer3/ > ~/Desktop/contents.txt

This gives me:

/Users/Desktop/printer1/:
Job1
Job2
job4

/Users/Desktop/printer2/:
Job1
Job2
Job3

/Users/Desktop/printer3/:
Job1

were using OSx but the printer folders are just hotfolders that are watched then spooled every 5 minutes or so by each Printers Rip. The problem we have is each team has a printer, but some teams produce more work than others. We use Filemaker to submit our approved EPS files to the hotfolders. However we find that 1 or 2 of the queues are always empty and 1 machine is full to bursting. We'd like a script that when our QC team approve the Artwork, Filemaker moves the EPS to the next available machine. The script i wrote before gives me a report, it would be great if i could take the info and maybe populate our database with a record of how many jobs are running on which machine.

check here for a possible solution ...