Hi all, I have a Debian Etch system. From the Gnome file manager, I can easily browse to SMB file shares on the network. So the SMB redirector is apparently present on the system.

Question - how do I access SMB shares from the command line? smbmount command is not available, trying to cd into a smb://... path gives a "No such file" error. Any ideas, please? I'm not looking for a persistent mapping, just a brief look. Better yet if root access is not necessary.

Try smbclient. Its kind of like a samba ftp client.
will list available shares.

connects to share.

mount.cifs will also work.

First of all add a user to smb

then type in,

This will list out the folders that are shared in your samba group

then,

.

smbtree - command not found.
smbclient - command not found.

Now, I'm not above installing packages when needed. It's the theoretical conundrum I'm worried about. Here I have a piece of functionality (SMB access in Gnome) that should extend all the way down to system call level. I mean, when I double-click a text file on the network, gedit is invoked with that file (it does, just checked). What kind of file name is passed to gedit? Is that a path in the regular filesystem? Is that an smb:// URL-style path? Is that a temporary local copy? If it's a smb: URL, is the magic for handling those somehow specific to gedit, or X Window applications in general?

I would reinstall the samba package.
I don't use gnome or debian but I'm pretty sure that when samba is installed those commands are present.

AFAIK the capabiity of browsing SMB shares is built into Gnome/Nautilus using GVFS and independent of the samba client utilties.

samba does have multiple packages i.e server, client and common. It is possible to install the server and common package without the client. Is samba installed?

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GVFS. Now that answers the question. A userland-level virtual filesystem which supports URL-style paths. And a client library which replaces the vanilla open() syscall, linked from every Gnome app. There's no syscall-level support for SMB redirector on my system after all.

EDIT: and by the way, there are GVFS-aware command line utilities in Gnome: gnomevfs-ls, gnomevfs-copy, gnomevfs-cat, etc.