cupsd-helper(8)

✨ cupsd-helper(8) ✨

okay bestie, gather round, because we're talking about cupsd-helper — the little helper squad that lives in the CUPS/OpenPrinting universe 💖

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🌸 NAME 🌸

cupsd-helper — the cupsd helper programs (and yes, they're deprecated, we'll get to that, don't panic 🫶)

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

cups-deviced request-id limit user-id options
cups-driverd cat ppd-name
cups-driverd list request_id limit options
cups-exec sandbox-profile [ -g group-id ] [ -n nice-value ] [ -u user-id
] /path/to/program argv0 ...  argvN

like… look at those signatures. three little programs, four little invocation shapes, all iconic 👑

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💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

so the cupsd-helper programs are the ones doing the long-running operations on behalf of the scheduler, aka cupsd(8). they're the backstage crew, the stagehands, the ones who make the show happen while cupsd takes the bow ✨

• the cups-deviced helper runs every single CUPS backend(7) with no arguments, specifically so it can go discover what printers are actually available. it's giving detective energy 🔍
• the cups-driverd helper can do three things: list all the available printer drivers, list a subset of the "matching" printer drivers, or hand you a copy of one specific driver PPD file. multitasking queen 💅
• the cups-exec helper runs backends, filters, and other programs. and on macOS? these programs get run in a secure sandbox. yes, really, they're protected 🛡️

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🦋 FILES 🦋

so cups-driverd goes looking for PPD and driver information files in these directories, in this order:

/Library/Printers
/opt/share/ppd
/System/Library/Printers
/usr/local/share/ppd
/usr/share/cups/drv
/usr/share/cups/model
/usr/share/ppd

and here's the glow-up: PPD files can be compressed with the gzip(1) program, or dropped into compressed tar(1) archives, to shrink them down even more. smaller files, same slay 🎀

driver information files, though? they have to conform to the format defined in ppdcfile(5). no freestyling, bestie, the format is the format 📝

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⭐ NOTES ⭐

heads up, this is the serious part so listen: CUPS printer drivers, backends, and PPD files are deprecated and will no longer be supported in a future feature release of CUPS.

if you've got printers that don't support IPP, you can support them using applications like ippeveprinter(1) instead. we move on, we adapt, we thrive 🌈

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💖 SEE ALSO 💖

• backend(7)
• cups(1)
• cupsd(8)
• cupsd.conf(5)
• filter(7)
• ppdcfile(5)
• CUPS Online Help (http://localhost:631/help)

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👑 COPYRIGHT 👑

Copyright © 2020-2024 by OpenPrinting.

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and that's the whole page, bestie 🫶 this was the cupsd-helper(8) manual, part of CUPS, dated 2021-02-28 — mwah, take care of your printers, they're doing their best 💜