Reliably Broken

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.

david mac, unix

Note to self: use screen when doing a bunch of remote administration stuff over an SSH connection. You can tell it to log the session to a separate file, and can detach the session and log off without having the remote shell be terminated. Then later you can resume the session and haven’t lost anything.

To start a shell and log everything to a file, do

screen -L -S mysession

That drops you into a new shell, and lets you refer to that session later (in case you are ambitious and have many screen sessions running simultaneously). To detach the session type CTRL+a then d. From there you can exit cleanly. To resume the session later, type

screen -r mysession

The session history will be saved to a file named screenlog.0 or similar in the directory where screen was first invoked.

screen man page online (Hmmm… looks like the hmug man pages have renamed themselves.)

I should use screen more often. I should also get in the habit of going through the contents of $PATH every time Mac OS X gets updated.

david screen, unix