Talking to a scanner from a PHP script

Question

I run a small business but I need to be somewhat more organised in terms of those letters and invoices i receive. This is what I want to accomplish:

1. When I receive a invoice or some other information on paper, I would place it in my scanners tray and leave it there.

2. Every 15 minutes my linux box ask my scanner if there is anything to scan and if so starts the scanning process and place the file in a folder.

Could anyone point me in the right direction to how I can talk to my scanner from a PHP-script, like "Are there anything to scan ?" and "Start scanning, place the file here"...

Answer 1

There's phpSane, a web frontend to your scanner. Internally it just exec's the scanimage commandline tool though. That's what I would use if I were you. scanimage is only available on Linux though.