How to access / mount Windows shares from Linux

Many times it required Linux users to access some share folder from Linux system, this can be achieve using mount command with CIFS.

The CIFS VFS is a virtual file system for Linux to allow access to servers and storage appliances compliant with the SNIA CIFS Specification version 1.0 or later.

Popular servers such as Samba, Windows 2000, Windows XP and many others support CIFS by default.   The CIFS VFS provides some support for older servers based on the more primitive SMB (Server Message Block) protocol (you also can use the Linux file system smbfs as an alternative for accessing these).

CIFS VFS is designed to take advantage of advanced network file system features such as locking, Unicode (advanced internationalization), hardlinks, dfs (hierarchical, replicated name space), distributed caching and uses native TCP names (rather than Netbios names).

Below is example of mounting the windows share folder on Linux:

First we need to make a directory on our Linux system where we can mount our windows share

mkdir /mnt/window

Mount suing cifs

# mount -t cifs //server-ip-or-name/share /mnt/window -o username=user,password=pass,domain=DOMAIN

Mount using smbfs

# mount -t smbfs //server-ip-or-name/share /mnt/window -o username=user,password=pass,domain=DOMAIN