smbclient (Samba)

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© May 2005 Tony Lawrence
2005/05/19

This is a Samba tool that's useful for testing Samba, doing backups to or from Windows shares, and similar tasks. For testing, the most common use is to list shares on a Windows machine or some other Samba server. Just do:

smbclient -L netbiosname
 

If you need to provide a user name, add "-U user". You can also supply a password either by adding it with "-U user%passwd" or by setting and exporting PASSWD, or by pointing it credentials file; see the man page.

For backups of PC shares, there's a "smbtar" shell script. It's just a wrapper for smbclient; read it to see how it works.

There's also an ftp-like interface. For example, here's a simple script that ftp's several directories using smbclient:

#!/bin/sh
export PASSWD
PASSWD=hpSj943xg
# choose backup file
DAY=`/bin/date +%u`
FILE="ahpbu"
case $DAY in
  1) FILE="ahpbu";;
  2) FILE="bhpbu";;
  3) FILE="chpbu";;
  4) FILE="dhpbu";;
  5) FILE="ehpbu";;
  6) FILE="fhpbu";;
  7) FILE="ghpbu";;
esac
for bufile in  database1 database2 
do
/opt/samba/bin/smbclient //bdcpub/$FILE  -U hp <<HERE
mkdir $bufile
cd $bufile
lcd /$bufile
recurse 
prompt off
mput *
quit
HERE
done
 

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