This has been driving me crazy

 

On ubuntu this will work

 

//server/cache  /server cifs  guest,uid=1000,iocharset=utf8,codepage=unicode,unicode  0  0

 

however this wont

 

//server/cache/.down  /server cifs  guest,uid=1000,iocharset=utf8,codepage=unicode,unicode  0  0

 

and neither will

 

//server/cache/\056down  /server cifs  guest,uid=1000,iocharset=utf8,codepage=unicode,unicode  0  0

 

or

 

//server/cache/\.down  /server cifs  guest,uid=1000,iocharset=utf8,codepage=unicode,unicode  0  0

 

anyone have any clue how to escape a dot "." when remotely mounting an unraid cache drive folder using fstab

How about "..." or '...'

 

"//server/cache/.down"  /server cifs  guest,uid=1000,iocharset=utf8,codepage=unicode,unicode  0  0

Unfortunately no luck.

 

I noticed it wasn't liking some of the options so i removed them, tweaked folder names, checked permissions and reran:

 

//SERVER/cache/.downloads  /downloads/tmp  cifs  guest,uid=1000,iocharset=utf8  0  0

mount error(2): No such file or directory

 

//SERVER/cache/\056downloads  /downloads/tmp  cifs  guest,uid=1000,iocharset=utf8  0  0

mount error(2): No such file or directory

 

"//SERVER/cache/.downloads"  /downloads/tmp  cifs  guest,uid=1000,iocharset=utf8  0  0

mount.cifs: bad UNC ("//SERVER/cache/.downloads")

 

'//SERVER/cache/.downloads'  /downloads/tmp  cifs  guest,uid=1000,iocharset=utf8  0  0

mount.cifs: bad UNC ('//SERVER/cache/.downloads')

 

//SERVER/cache/'.downloads'  /downloads/tmp  cifs  guest,uid=1000,iocharset=utf8  0  0

Refer to the mount.cifs( manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs)

 

Have you tried mounting non-dotted subdirectories of the cache dir to see if that works? As in, //SERVER/cache is a share, .downloads is a subfolder of the share. Try just making a normal directory under //SERVER/cache and see if you can mount it. I would have thought you mounted the share, then if you wanted to link the subdirectory you'd just make a symlink.

 

Also, I assume you also can't manually mount it with the mount command, or is this exclusively an fstab issue? Can you actually see / change directory to the .downloads folder if you mount //SERVER/cache?

As per OP it is only fstab and the dot that is causing issues. I can easily mount "//SERVER/cache/downloads" but cannot mount "//SERVER/cache/.downloads"

 

I can obviously get around this in one of a few other ways but I am keen to solve the actual core issue for myself and the record.