MacOS – way to click windows fileshare links in macos

macosNetworksmb

My company (like many others) primarily uses Windows computers and as such has a lot of Windows-based fileshares. We have also standardized which fileshares map to which lettered drives on those PCs, so everyone has the same "F" drive.

I know that I can use the "connect to server" functionality using the smb: protocol to connect to them. However, a lot of our intranet websites and emails have links that just point to "F:/docs/some/files". When I am using my mac I can't click on those links because Macos doesn't know how to handle them.

Is there some way to configure Macos, or some app I can install, which will automatically handle those links and map them to the appropriate smb: path?

Best Answer

There is a wonderful free tool called WinShortcutter for Mac that allows you to do exactly what you're wanting.

Winshortcutter can be found here: http://winshortcutter.com/

After installing, you can change a setting in the Mac services screen to allow this as a right click option as well.

Related Solutions

MacOS – Permissions issue when copying files over SMB to server on OS X 10.9 Mavericks

Usually the authentication prompt is in relation to the destination for your copy.

Thus, from what you're describing, you should enter your Gentoo login credentials. However, I suspect the owner/write permission are too restrictive on that specific volume. Have you checked owner user/group on the problematic volume vs. the other "problem-free" volumes? Are the read/write permissions the same?

To change the permissions without resorting to Terminal, highlight the folder you want to put the user file in and select Get Info (Cmd+i). At the bottom are the permissions. Make sure that where it says "everyone" that it also says "Read & Write." You may have to click the little gold lock at the bottom of the Get Info pane to adjust this. Once you do this, you will be able to copy your folder over.

MacOS – How to mount remote shares that have the same name, and easily differentiate them in the Finder

Although tags cannot be edited directly from the finder for volumes, comments can.

Therefore, I went into Side bar → Devices → Machine Name (which is where I can see all the volumes. In fact, it shows the /Volumes folder), and did the following:

I added the name of the particular server as a comment to each of the volumes.
In the finder view options, I added the comment column so that it shows when the folder is in list view, and checked the "always open in list view" option.

Therefore, now, whenever I open the volumes list I can see the comment and know exactly which share I want to open.

Previous to discovering this, I discovered that although volume tags cannot be edited from the finder, they can be changed through command line.

Create a dummy folder or use some existing folder in your own home folder. Change its tag to whatever you want the volume to have.
Get info on the volume you want to change, to see its current name. That is, if the share name is your username userX, and you have more than one such share mounted, one will be named userX, the next userX-1, userX-2 and so on. You can find out the name by getting info on the volume and looking at the "Name and extension" box.
Run the following commands from terminal to copy the tags from you dummy folder:
```
xattr -wx com.apple.metadata:_kMDItemUserTags "$(xattr -px com.apple.metadata:_kMDItemUserTags /Users/userX/dummyFolder )" /Volumes/userX-N
xattr -wx com.apple.FinderInfo "$(xattr -px com.apple.FinderInfo /Users/userX/dummyFolder )" /Volumes/userX-N
```
Replace /Users/userX/dummyFolder with the full path of your dummy folder (you can drag it to the terminal window for that), and /Volumes/userX-N with the name of the volume that you verified above.

I learned this method from this answer.

Nevertheless I prefer the first method I mentioned, now that I discovered it, because:

It displays actual textual information rather than a color I have to remember the meaning of (though of course I could go for a text tag rather than a color tag).
It requires no command-line access, only simple finder operations.
It doesn't change anything in the volume that isn't supposed to be changed.

Note: Both solutions require that you do not remove the .DS_store file on the server.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – Permissions issue when copying files over SMB to server on OS X 10.9 Mavericks

MacOS – How to mount remote shares that have the same name, and easily differentiate them in the Finder

Related Question