I recently came across an issue with a corrupt cups config file. Been awhile since I saw something like that, but it turned out to be a setting that was manually configured, so no big surprise. Luckily, cups has a sanity checker built in. Let’s look at the cups config file in Mac OS X. To do so, run cupsd with the same commands you’d normally use to fire it up, but append a -t at the end (lots of daemons actually allow the use of a -t):
cupsd -f -c /private/etc/cups/cupsd.conf -t
The output would, if working properly provide the following:
"/private/etc/cups/cups-files.conf" is OK.
"/private/etc/cups/cupsd.conf" is OK.
Otherwise you’d see an error code you could then chase down. FYI, mine was an invalid spelling of default, which is basically how I knew it was a human error…
