Make HP Communications work with sleep in 10.3

Sep 23, '04 09:15:00AM

Contributed by: toonerh

For those of us using a scanner, fax or other multifunction device from HP, we are cursed by its buggy communications daemon process known as "HP Communications." It is normally well-behaved, but it can be very grumpy when unexpectedly aroused from a nap :-) [i.e. sleep mode]. Running Panther, after wake from sleep, it sometimes maxes out CPU usage and renders the HP device unusable. Either reboot or try the following...

  1. Install Bernhard Baehr's excellent Sleepwatcher (credit to this hint). And credit here for scripts.

  2. Create the the below .sleep and .wakeup shell scripts by copying text into Terminal. Here's .sleep:
    #!/bin/sh
    #
    # sleep: kill HP Communications process
    #
    kill -HUP `ps axwww | egrep -i \
    "/Library/Printers/hp/HP Communications.app" | egrep -iv \
    "egrep -i" | awk '{print $1}'`
    
    And here's .wakeup:
    #!/bin/sh
    #
    # wakeup: start HP Commmunications process
    #
    open /Library/Printers/hp/HP\ Communications.app
    
    To enter these easily, open the Terminal, type cd and hit return (to make sure you're in your home directory), then type cat >.sleep, and paste in the above .sleep script, then type Control-D. Do the same for .wakeup. Then set both scripts executable (via chmod 755 .sleep or .wakeup).

  3. HP Communications shuts down on sleep, and restarts when you wake.
That's it, though more tweaks may be needed in a multiuser environment, probably moving the code above to /etc/rc.sleep and /etc/rc.wakeup as root. See Sleepwatcher for more info.

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