Scripting a change in printer driver (help needed with command syntax)

blackholemac
Valued Contributor III

So we are using PaperCut and have generated a universal print queue that someone in any classroom can print to and then they can release the print job on any managed printer in the district. That part works really well and I was able to deploy somewhat easily through Casper.

We have a problem now in that the driver we chose for the universal print queue, a Konica Bizhub 554, is causing print jobs to come out with error messages. Being that we haven't had problems with this print queue before, I was slow to come to the answer, but I did come definitively to one. We are printing to Konica Bizhub 4750s. In the past, printing to other Konica model printers didn't pose a problem. The service just worked. In desperation, I tried the native driver for a 4750 and that print queue worked properly.

So in short the answer is, we need to change the printer that was added to all of our Macs to use a new driver. Where I need help is this...I wish to change the driver used by a given printer without deleting and re-adding it to the Mac if at all possible. What lpadmin syntax would I use to change the print driver programmatically on a printer that is already setup on a machine. By GUI, I do it by enabling the CUPS web interface and going through changing it in there.

Hopefully someone has some ideas on this. Thank anyone in advance.

1 REPLY 1

blackholemac
Valued Contributor III

Never mind...wrote this honestly before sitting down to reason through it. Basically I will answer my own question:

lpadmin -p <exact name of existing printer here as listed in command line> -P <full path to PPD here>

I will test that out here and if it works, I answered my own question.