Midnight Commander and SMB

[Dan M.]

Dear Juan & Andrew,

Just following up,

the problem mentioned on my web page of notes concerning the tree
pane in gmc can be worked around - I'm guessing that because smbwrapper
ignores paths it considers to be on the local file system, and passes
through control to the real system call (?), gmc is getting confused
That is, smbwrapper doesn't report the /smb directory as existing
when gmc reads the root directory. One workaround is to create the
/smb directory as root, which fools gmc enough to make it place the
folder representation of the remote host inside the smb directory. If
you don't do this, the smb hosts appear in the gmc tree list at the top
level, ie. you get a directory named after each host in your root
directory, and you won't get the full list of shares in the left-hand
tree window for that host.

Ie. the effect of the smbwrapper code is that although the /smb
directory may exist in / from the perspective of the application, 
it doesn't within the context of what readdir() would return for the
parent directory (in this case the root directory). It seems that some
applications might be confused by this. One workaround would be to make
smbwrapper also `fake` the /smb directory from within the root directory,
would be my best guess.

With all of this stuff sorted out, i can now smbwrap my whole login
shell and X session, including gnome & gmc and browse the workgroup in
With all of this stuff sorted out, i can now smbwrap my whole login
shell and X session, including gnome & gmc and browse the workgroup in
both panes. I've just copied a large and infested Program Files folder
from a Win95 box via gmc to my Gnome desktop folder (around 112M worth)
at pretty much full speed, adding only a small load
to the system (and no apparent glitches). A lot nicer than moving files
around with the Windows Explorer anyway, which is I expect what most
Windows users are used to.

Andrew, are you sure this is not a good way to abstract away different
filesystem types in userspace? The smbwrapper/gmc combination performs
magnificently.

Kind regards,

Daniel Morriss
Simplicity IT