Two things, first, Scott Grannenman's book 'Linux Phrasebook' is a really great introduction to command line, a bit less forbidding and shorter than Linux in a Nutshell, and more pedagogically oriented, lots of examples and when and how to use stuff. Second, I would really like to reply in threads, I realize its very irritating when people do not do this, but how do you do it when receiving only the digest? Is there a nabble or similar page for main as there is for one or two other lists? I've not beein able to find it for this one. Or do I simply have to start getting the messages as they come in and segregate them in the client? Which is kmail, by the way. Incidentally, the printer, which people were kind enough to help with earlier, well, it works! Amazing. It prints out the receipts, and then as if by magic, it operates the cutter, and then equally magically, it opens the cash drawer! The last trick I had to overcome was that ghex for some reason didn't seem to want to make a text file with only hex 7 in it, so I used the far superior bless. And there turned out to be a trick to passing an echo string with quotes in it to the shell from my programming language, you have to do some fairly convoluted things to manage to escape the quotes in the string you want to pass. But hey, it works now, and you will all know that nice feeling you get when, bingo, the bell rings and the drawer opens, just as it should. So thanks. Peter