Ubuntu – Gvfs folder location in Ubuntu Mate 15.04

The ~/.gvfs directory should be a FUSE mount handled by the gvfs-fuse-daemon process. If the directory appears to be empty, it would indicate that gvfs-fuse-daemon did not start correctly.

You could try starting it manually with the following command:

/usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-fuse-daemon ~/.gvfs

If that fails, you could try checking whether anything else is mounted there, or even delete and recreate the ~/.gvfs directory first. If things still fail, could you update your question and provide any error messages printed by gvfs-fuse-daemon?

** On 14.04 the daemon is called gvfsd-fuse and can be found in /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-fuse.

Suppose you have a directory called mounts in your home directory in which you want various Samba shares to be mounted. Suppose further that you are specifically interested in mounting a share called sharename from a remote machine called hostname (this could also be an IP address), and on that remote machine your username is username. First, create the mount point:

mkdir ~/mounts/sharename

Then mount the share:

sudo mount.cifs //hostname/sharename ~/mounts/sharename -o user=username

In Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and earlier, if you don't have the mount.cifs command, you can either install the cifs-utils package, or use smbmount instead (which is, in turn, provided by the smbfs package).

sudo smbmount //hostname/sharename ~/mounts/sharename -o user=username

(smbmount is not available in Ubuntu 12.10 or higher, at least so far, but you can use mount.cifs instead. Thanks to HDave for pointing this out.)

You may be prompted for your password on the local machine, to run the command as root. Then you'll be prompted for your password on the remote machine, to log in so you can mount the share.