I’ve been using Nick McSpadden’s excellent PrinterGenerator script for about two years now. If you’re not familiar with the utility, it parses either command line options or a CSV file into munki pkginfo files that install the printer. The big deal (at least for me) is that the utility also creates a great install check script – this is way better than my old method of pushing a package, which doesn’t react at all if the user manages to remove the printer somehow.
We have some Ricoh machines that have a bunch of options as they’re full-featured production printers. I got sick and tired of editing these by hand, so I wrote a quick python script to parse the output of lpoptions and format it in a nice, easy to copy-paste way.
This should save you a few minutes. Set up the printer on your local machine to your liking and then run the script, passing the name of the printer queue to it (./printer-parser.py My_Printer). If you aren’t sure what the printer name is, do lpstat -p – it will show you all the printers you have added to your machine.
Beautiful! I was staring at 140 different printer options and was in the process of using Excel to break it down into different columns, thought “There must be a better way!” and then found your script. Thanks for sharing!