How do I navigate to a samba location I've mounted in Nautilus on the command line?

Question

Please note: I am two weeks old in Linux. I have found a lot of answers to this question on the internet, tried many, but all failed one way or another. Therefore I dare to ask once again in the hope that someone here could explain it simply :)

Pre-conditions:

In my institute, we have a Samba server. In Windows, it is accessed by going to \\xyz.220.131.233\ and entering the login abc and the password def.

In Ubuntu, I was able to do exactly the same using Nautilus, pressing Ctrl+L and entering smb://xyz.220.131.233/. It then asks for the login and the password and connects. I can even drag a folder from here to the 'Places' and have a shortcut to the remote location.

So far so good. I've just installed Matlab and want to open this remote location. Trying to cd to smb://xyz.220.131.233/ returns

Cannot CD to smb://xyz.220.131.233 (Name is nonexistent or not a directory).

A Mac user in my group told me I first mount the location, but he didn't know how to do it.

Is it true and how do I do it?

score 92 · Answer 1 · edited Jan 13 '20 at 15:55

In most cases:

$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/gvfs

14.04:

/run/user/$(id -u)/gvfs

12.10:

/run/user/<username>/gvfs

12.04:

Since 12.04 the folder of mounted samba share is:

~/.cache/gvfs

11.10 and older

You can learn how to mount - it will sure works. But I think this is an easier solution for you: Nautilus mount smb partitions at ~/.gvfs (where ~/ means /home/user_name/ - example: /home/desgua/.gvfs).
You just have to navigate to there:

cd ~/.gvfs

score 7 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 14 '18 at 09:49

Another option here, while not directly related to having mounted the directory in nautilus is to mount the location from the command line.

However, to mount samba volumes, you have to have CIFS support.

sudo apt-get install cifs-utils

From here, you have the option of where you want to mount the location. There are TWO "standards" of sorts for this. If you want the location to show up in the Places menu, you would mount it in /media. If not, you would mount it in /mnt (only to follow the common namespace for mounted volumes. There’s nothing wrong with mounting the directory in /home/$user/mount/someshare)

^{Illustration of the mounted location in the Places menu}

assuming that /media/myshare exist, you would achieve this by issuing the following command:

sudo mount -t cifs -o user=abc,password=def //xyz.220.131.233 /media/myshare

Side note

You can accomplish this automagically by appending the following string to your /etc/fstab configuration:

//xyz.220.131.233 /media/SambaMount cifs username=abc,password=def,rw,user,noauto 0 0

Notice the noauto flag, this will keep the volume from being mounted at boot, so when you're no longer at your workplace, it won't hang during boot trying to poll and mount that share.

score 4 · Answer 3 · edited Jun 10 '16 at 09:55

4

in ubuntu 16.04 and vlc 2.2.2 ;

Select media > Open Directory and navigate to /run/user/1000/gvfs/ << ID number (1000) can be vary on your system.

Here you can see the shared folder name and select the folder whichever you want to add in playlist (see picture below)

vlc add dierctory

edited Jun 10 '16 at 09:55

Videonauth

33,815

answered Jun 10 '16 at 09:20

xkeshav

809
1
9
23

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 24 '12 at 00:28

2

On 12.10 you can find the location at

/run/user/USERNAME/gvfs/

answered Nov 24 '12 at 00:28

ben_nuttall

438

score 2 · Answer 5 · edited Apr 18 '13 at 13:33

2

On Ubuntu 12.04 I'm running:

~/.gvfs/[SHARENAME]

~/.cache/ only contains a folder gvfs-burn

edited Apr 18 '13 at 13:33

BuZZ-dEE

14,533

answered Apr 18 '13 at 13:11

88weighed

700

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 08 '11 at 16:18

So, not sure if this is the real answer (please comment if in doubt or checked it yourself), but after some struggling together with another Linux colleague I've realised that I actually was not in the users group in my system (nano /etc/group). Upon adding myself to this group (sudo nano /etc/group, adding my name to the users line), I am now able to access the remote directories. My /etc/fstab file has these lines:

//xxx.220.131.233/user  /mnt/rua_user  cifs  username=abc,password=def 0 1
//xxx.220.131.233/all   /mnt/rua_all   cifs  username=abc,password=def 0 1

The rights on the folders look like this (ls -lh /mnt):

drwxrwx---  8 1016 users 0 2011-03-08 11:14 rua_all
drwxrwx--- 25 1016 users 0 2011-05-25 18:21 rua_user

score 1 · Answer 7 · answered Apr 04 '11 at 16:56

1

Follow this page. I followed it to get the same result as what you are looking for.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MountWindowsSharesPermanently

answered Apr 04 '11 at 16:56

NateW

510

score 1 · Answer 8 · answered Aug 14 '14 at 01:47

1

in some of latest (e.g., 13.XX, 14.XX) ubuntu , you need to go to

/run/user/(USERID)/gvfs/

to find the mounted location. here (UID) is the UID of the account, which can be found by the command

id

answered Aug 14 '14 at 01:47

Chenming Zhang

270

score 1 · Answer 9 · edited Aug 09 '16 at 09:59

1

ln -s "/run/user/1000/gvfs/smb-share:server=192.168.1.1,share=Name_server/Path_Directory_source_in/Path_file.pdf" /Path_directory_source_out/Path_file.pdf

This is my example of how to make a file link from terminal in Ubuntu.

Use double quotes "" to escape special characters such as spaces

edited Aug 09 '16 at 09:59

Zanna

72,312

answered Aug 08 '16 at 13:08

ugreg

11