Need help extracting printer driver name from ppd files

[Helge Blischke]

Jeep Guy wrote:

> Without going into too much detail, I have a few groups of HA print
> servers in dev, QA, Prod environments and I need to keep the configs in
> sync.  I am writing a perl script that will extract most of the printer
> info from the printers.conf file and dump it to a semi-colon delimited
> file.  I intend to use this file later to rebuild the basic printer
> configs on other systems using the lpadmin command.
> 
> The problem that I am having is that I do not know how to get the print
> driver to be used with the lpadmin command.  I want to add the printers as
> follows:
> 
> lpadmin -L <location> -D <description> -p <Printer Name> -v <device URI>
> -m <printer driver> -E
> 
> I can get everything I need from the printers.conf file except for the
> <printer driver>.  It looks like the /etc/cups/ppd/<Printer Name>.ppd conf
> file should hold what I am looking for but I don't know if that is true or
> if so which variable I should be looking for in that file.
> 
> Would someone knowledgeable please chime in and let me know where to get
> the printer driver to plug into the lpadmin command?
> 
> Thanks.

Yes, the /etc/cups/ppd/<printername>.ppd file *is* the PPD associated with 
the <printername> and reflects the default preferences (like default page 
size etc.) you configured either using the web interface or the lpadmin 
command.
The problem is that there is - as far as I know - no information abour the 
source directory the PPD has been installed from. That means your Perl 
script needs to copy the PPD from the /etc/cups/ppd directory to some 
globally accessible place (e.g. a NFS accessible directory).

Helge