10.3: Turn fax services on and off from the command Line
Jan 21, '04 10:52:00AM • Contributed by: Iowa Boy
Jan 21, '04 10:52:00AM • Contributed by: Iowa Boy
Faxing is a cool feature on OS X, but few people purchase a separate phone line for a fax machine at home. So, if you want to receive a fax during the day on your home Mac, then legitimate callers will get the fax tone rather than your answering machine, because the modems built into the Macs do not detect if a fax is coming in and automatically answer it like the old Global Village (and probably other modems) did. The solution is to log into your Mac remotely (SSH) and using the command line turn faxing on and off as needed to minimize the amount of time your fax software is turned on. First, start with faxing enabled in the System Preferences. Then, you can remotely log in to stop it by typing the following at the command line:
sudo fax stop
Now the tricky part is starting it up again remotely. You need to remove a file at the following location:
sudo rm /private/var/spool/fax/cu.modem.stop
Once that file is removed, the fax daemon (efax) should automatically start up again. I believe you can start it remotely, if it isn't already on, by entering the following:
sudo fax answer
But that should be all you need to do. You can read the man page for fax and efax for more information. The only item in the man pages that isn't correct is the name of the file that needs to be deleted. In the man pages it indicates the DEV.stop file needs to be deleted. That's not correct for Mac OS X.
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