After a print job has finished spooling to a service, this command will be used via a system() call to process the spool file. Typically the command specified will submit the spool file to the host's printing subsystem, but there is no requirement that this be the case. The server will not remove the spool file, so whatever command you specify should remove the spool file when it has been processed, otherwise you will need to manually remove old spool files. The print command is simply a text string. It will be used verbatim after macro substitutions have been made: %s, %f - the path to the spool file name %p - the appropriate printer name %J - the job name as transmitted by the client. %c - The number of printed pages of the spooled job (if known). %z - the size of the spooled print job (in bytes) The print command MUST contain at least one occurrence of %s or %f - the %p is optional. At the time a job is submitted, if no printer name is supplied the %p will be silently removed from the printer command. If specified in the [global] section, the print command given will be used for any printable service that does not have its own print command specified. If there is neither a specified print command for a printable service nor a global print command, spool files will be created but not processed and (most importantly) not removed. Note that printing may fail on some UNIXes from the nobody account. If this happens then create an alternative guest account that can print and set the in the [global] section. You can form quite complex print commands by realizing that they are just passed to a shell. For example the following will log a print job, print the file, then remove it. Note that ';' is the usual separator for command in shell scripts. print command = echo Printing %s >> /tmp/print.log; lpr -P %p %s; rm %s You may have to vary this command considerably depending on how you normally print files on your system. The default for the parameter varies depending on the setting of the parameter. Default: For printing = BSD, AIX, QNX, LPRNG or PLP : print command = lpr -r -P%p %s For printing = SYSV or HPUX : print command = lp -c -d%p %s; rm %s For printing = SOFTQ : print command = lp -d%p -s %s; rm %s For printing = CUPS : If SAMBA is compiled against libcups, then cups uses the CUPS API to submit jobs, etc. Otherwise it maps to the System V commands with the -oraw option for printing, i.e. it uses lp -c -d%p -oraw; rm %s. With printing = cups, and if SAMBA is compiled against libcups, any manually set print command will be ignored. /usr/local/samba/bin/myprintscript %p %s