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Removing printing restrictions in 10.5

Removing printing restrictions in 10.5

January 13, 2010

I am trying to write a good one-liner for removing all restrictions on printing for Mac OS X 10.5. I had thought that sed would be perfect for this, but I can’t arrive at a simple syntax for appending new lines that works well when pasted into a terminal window. Here’s what I ended up with:

perl -p -0 -i '.bak' -e 's/(Policy default).*(Policy)/$1>\n<Limit All>\nOrder deny,allow\nAllow from all\n<\/Limit>\n<$2/s' /private/etc/cups/cupsd.conf

Rather brutal, it just guts the default policy and replaces it with the following:

<Policy default>
<Limit All>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Limit>
</Policy>

Greg Neagle has a useful article about printing in the enterprise. Apple suggests adding the network group to the local lpadmin group, but points out that mobile users would need to be added individually. In my case most accounts are mobile accounts and we trust everyone to manage print queues on a Mac, so removing all restrictions is acceptable.

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