mount within gnome access it using terminal?

I sometimes have to connect to a windows share from my linux box. I do this using samba (ff course). However when I start a gnome terminal and I want to go on that mounted share, I don’t see it. If I use the commandline smbmount I can access it. Does anybody know how you can achieve this? I find it strange that I have to mount it twice, once from inside gnome and once from inside my gnome terminal. Should be a solution no?

2 Replies to “mount within gnome access it using terminal?”

  1. On a recent Gnome, samba shares get mounted through a user space process (fuser), part of the new gnome virtual file system (gvfs).

    Have a look in ~/.gvfs/

    Bookmark that directory in Nautilus as “Network”.

    sshfs mounts and ftp also get mounted there.

    On older Gnomes you could not access it through cli without mounting it system wide.

  2. When you ‘mount’ it from inside gnome, you don’t actually mount it. Instead, you use gnome’s virtual filesystem thingy (called ‘gvfs’ in the most recent iterations of gnome) to access the server. This isn’t a samba mount, it’s the gvfs implementation talking to the smb server directly (whether using a library or a shellout of smbclient, I’m not sure). You don’t see it since the implementation hides the details away from you, but it’s still there. This implementation works similarly to how gvfs works with ‘ssh://’ urls, BTW.

    Of course, since this is an emulation created by gnome rather than an actual mount, you won’t see that mount when you access your command line.

    Now since gvfs is not nautilus-specific, you will still be able to access those files from other gnome-based applications; and I suppose nautilus can make it work transparently for non-gnome applications by downloading the file to a temporary location, starting the application on that temporary file, and then uploading it again afterwards. This doesn’t work for a terminal, however.

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