Enabling or Disabling ALL Printers at once with Mac OS or Linux

Want to enable or disable all of your printers at once on Mac/Linux?

When installing PaperCut on Mac or Linux, you’ll need to run the Control Printer Monitoring.command (Mac) or configure-cups program (Linux) in order to enable monitoring of those printers in PaperCut. This system works well since it gives you complete control over which printers are monitored and which are not.

If you’re installing PaperCut on a machine which has many (possibly hundreds) of print queues, then it takes a while to select ‘E’ for ‘Enable’ for each of the printers. In this case, there’s a shortcut. The below commands will add or remove all your print queues to/from PaperCut monitoring. You’ll need to open a command prompt (e.g. ‘Terminal’ on the Mac) to run these commands, and you’ll need to have your print queues already set up, and the PaperCut Print Provider installed.

In this case the example Print Provider path is Mac based (and MF based), but the same applies for the Linux environment (and NG):

This will enable all your printers:
cd /Applications/PaperCut\ MF/providers/print/mac/
sudo ./configure-cups add-all 2>&1

This will disable all your printers:
cd /Applications/PaperCut\ MF/providers/print/mac/
sudo ./configure-cups remove-all 2>&1

These commands do the equivalent of running the configure-cups utility, and selecting ‘E’ for ‘Enable’ for every printer, or ‘D’ for ‘Disable’ for every printer in the list.

To always ignore a particular printer, take a look at the ‘Adding and Removing/Deleting/Ignoring Printers’ article.

On Windows, the printers are automatically detected by the Print Provider, so there is no need to add them specifically to PaperCut for monitoring. To ignore printers in windows, refer to the ‘Adding and Removing/Deleting/Ignoring Printers’ article.