How Do I Map a Drive Network Share Using the Linux Terminal?

Still getting used to Linux, and the GUI is great. I have Ubuntu 10 and I can go to Network and see the Windows network. Then double clicking this gets me to the drives that are shared. Then when I go back to the terminal and use:

cd ~/.gvfs

I can see the mapped drives. But it would be nice if I could this without all the mouse clicking. So how do I map network drives in the terminal, something akin to net use for Windows.

EDIT: Not sure what happened, but this is what I did to get it to work. I created the directory for the share in /media and then ran:

sudo mount -t cifs -o username=nicorellius //server/share/ /media/share

and it said command couldn't be found. So i thought I would go ahead and use smbfs so I ran:

sudo apt-get install smbfs

I tried the command suggested with smbfs instead of cifs and that didn't work either. So I tried again and then the next time I ran:

sudo mount -t cifs -o username=nicorellius //server/share/ /media/share

it worked and I could navigate to the directory with cd.

nicorellius

Posted 2010-05-25T17:19:50.463

Reputation: 5 865

Answers

Create a directory on your machine to use as a mount point for the share:

sudo mkdir /media/yoursharename

Then use the mount command to map a Windows share to the mount point you just created:

sudo mount -t cifs -o username=nicorellius //server/sharename /media/yoursharename

You should now be to access the share from your /media/yoursharename mount point.

John Rabotnik

Posted 2010-05-25T17:19:50.463

Reputation: 1 021

Isn't Samba already installed? Is it not the program that is accessing the share when I go to Places > Network and find the Windows network? – nicorellius – 2010-05-25T18:20:12.220

1Samba is already installed, but smbfs for mounting remote file systems isn't by default on Ubuntu, I've used this method for for a long time but I've just checked and cifs seems to have superseded smbfs and I imagine the gui is mounting the drive using cifs as well. I've modified the mount command to the cifs version in my original answer. You should be to run this without installing any extra packages. – John Rabotnik – 2010-05-25T19:19:27.493

See edit in my question for what I did to make it work... – nicorellius – 2010-05-25T23:03:08.887

Oddly enough, I tried this on the other share I needed access to and it didn't work. Something about the IP address or sever name... So I tried with the local IP 192.168.x.x and this worked as well. Great help, John - Thanks! – nicorellius – 2010-05-25T23:18:38.990

what is cifs? – João Pimentel Ferreira – 2018-07-23T13:45:09.097

@JoãoPimentelFerreira It's kind of the same as smb. And you have to have cifs-utils installed for the mount command to work. – Shayan – 2019-08-29T18:22:35.080

gvfs-mount can be used to mount filesystems under ~/.gvfs in the same manner as Gnome applications.

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams

Posted 2010-05-25T17:19:50.463

Reputation: 100 516

2syntax would be:

`gvfs-mount mount smb://username@server.tld/share`

You may have to create a bookmark first. – Flow – 2011-08-20T16:29:36.073