thanks for the responses steve, william,Cristopher,herb, and kees. I have made some changes and realized that you must logout and back in form the client in order to use the updated smb.conf.. this was my first problem. so now I have a print command = lp -c -d%p %s;rm %s which from my man page on lp (in freebsd 2.2.6) says lp should not exit untill it is finished using the spool file .. this should be exactly what I want. exept it doesn't seem to be doing that. It still is just printing the very top of the file. (the lp -d%p %s without the rm command works fine but the file stays there of course.. ) so it seems that either I am misinterpreting the man page or -c isn't working. any more Ideas I hate to leave the spool files there for a cron job to clean up.. whith the size and frequency of HUGE files i am afraid I would run out of space or risk deleting an active job.. thanks guys for all the help so far... Robert