Hey all, I'm trying to mount a Windows share that contains white space and I'm not having any luck. Here's my mount command:

I can mount my Shared share so permissions and such are all ok. I've tried enclosing the entire UNC path in quotes and worked my way down to just Not Shared. I've even used \040 instead of the white space but no joy. Googling this tells me people are using quotes or the \040 but they aren't working for me. Any ideas, suggestions or recommendations?

Thanks,

Joe B

Quotes should work. Is your share actually called "Not Shared"? Because that's the default text in Windows for folders that are, well, not shared at all.

Does name resolution work? Does host server1 return server1's IP address?

Does ping server1 work?

What's the exact error message you're seeing? Are there any CIFS-related errors in the logs? (Try dmesg | tail)

Hi Ser Olmy, here's what I'm seeing with your suggestions:

Yes, it's actually called "Not Shared." Mount can see it because if I remove "Shares" from the path I get a "No such device or address" error message.

Name resolution works fine; host returns the IP address.

Pinging the server works just fine too.

That's part of my problem -- there are no error messages. I type in the mount string, hit ENTER and all I see is a carriage return. When I pull an ls -l on the mounted share there's nothing there.

Ah yes, here's the error:

I checked and that error message is related to incorrect syntax. I kinda figured that part out.

Any other ideas?

Thanks,

Joe B

The \040 is an ASCII space character in octal (32 in decimal, 20 in hexadecimal). I haven't tried it, but I found mention of it on a google search. It was for a mount in fstab.


EDIT: I figured it out. For a command line mount, just escape the space normally. In other words, just put a backslash in front of the space:

I actually asked a rather stupid question about the share name in my last post, since you're not actually mounting a share called "Not Shared", but a subfolder under a share called "Shares". And it does not matter one iota whether that folder is shared or not, as long as the parent folder is.

I've just done a little testing, and I can confirm that:

• the cifs subsystem is capable of mounting subfolders (at least in kernel 3.9.9 with a reasonably new cifs-utils package)
• you can have spaces in the mount path as long as you use quotes ("\\Server\Share\name with whitespace") or escape it with a backslash

So, given that name resolution works and the correct permissions are set on the share and the folder, this most definitely should work:What does mount.cifs -V report? And which kernel version are you running?

Z038, thanks but escaping the space with the backslash didn't work.

Ser Olmy, mount.cifs -V give me:

Thanks,

Joe B

Oh yeah, the kernel version:

Thanks,

Joe B

That's a slightly old kernel, and your cifs-utils (mount.cifs et al) package is a major version behind the one I'm using, 5.5.

I can't say definitely that either the kernel or cifs-utils are causing this problem, but I can say that I'm not having any trouble mounting a subfolder with a name containing spaces using version 5.5 of cifs-utils and a recent kernel.

The syntax-related error message in the log seems to point in the direction of cifs-utils. If a more recent package is available for your distribution, you could try upgrading.

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Thanks Ser Olmy, I'll give it a shot and see what happens.

Thanks,

Joe B

Thank you Ser Olmy! I did your recommended upgrades for my cifs.utils and my kernel and my mount command (using quotes) is working fine now.

Thanks for the help,

Joe B