Using Samba, 3rd Edition

Appendix A. Summary of Samba Daemons and Commands

This appendix is a reference listing of command-line options and other information to help you use the programs that come with the Samba distribution.

SMB URI Syntax

Commands that make use of Samba’s libsmbclient library frequently prefer (or require) the SMB URI syntax instead of the UNC path when accessing SMB/CIFS servers. The SMB URI syntax is similar to the URIs used to access resources on the Internet, such as ftp://ftp.samba.org/pub/samba/ or http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/index.html.

The smb:// syntax can be used to enumerate browse lists of workgroups or shares on servers. The following two URI examples enumerate the contents of a workgroup’s browse list and a servers collection of shares:

smb://workgroup/

smb://server/

These next two examples connect to a share on a specific server.

smb://server/share

smb://workgroup/server/share

These final two examples are used to connect to the same shares as in the previous listing, but include user credentials in the URI string:

smb://username:password@server/share

smb://username:password@workgroup/server/share

More information on the SMB URI syntax can be found in the latest copy of the draft-crhertel-smb-uri Internet draft at http://ubiqx.org/cifs.

Samba Daemons

The following sections provide information about the command-line parameters for smbd, nmbd, winbindd, and swat. Some options are shared by all four daemons:

-?|--help

Print usage information for the command.

--usage