I mounted a WinXPH shared directory as an smbfs in Linux x86 kernel 2.6.11-gentoo-r3 and did a: # ls -alR /mnt/smbfs |wc several times and got the following results: aphrodite iTunesMusic # ls -alR|wc 15043 149134 856136 aphrodite iTunesMusic # ls -alR|wc 15043 149134 856136 aphrodite iTunesMusic # ls -alR|wc 15043 149134 856136 aphrodite iTunesMusic # ls -alR|wc 14935 148076 849759 aphrodite iTunesMusic # ls -alR|wc 15269 151731 870910 aphrodite iTunesMusic # ls -alR|wc 14935 148076 849759 aphrodite iTunesMusic # ls -alR|wc 15291 151645 870870 aphrodite iTunesMusic # ls -alR|wc 15269 151731 870910 aphrodite iTunesMusic # ls -alR|wc 15043 149134 856136 aphrodite iTunesMusic # ls -alR|wc 14935 148076 849759 I did the same thing in Mac OSX 10.3.9 (smbclient --version says it's version 3.0.10) and got similar results: hermes:/Volumes/music/iTunesMusic$ ls -alR|wc 15458 153680 947758 hermes:/Volumes/music/iTunesMusic$ ls -alR|wc 15458 153680 947758 hermes:/Volumes/music/iTunesMusic$ ls -alR|wc 15328 152302 939301 hermes:/Volumes/music/iTunesMusic$ ls -alR|wc 15458 153680 947758 hermes:/Volumes/music/iTunesMusic$ ls -alR|wc 15458 153680 947758 hermes:/Volumes/music/iTunesMusic$ ls -alR|wc 15458 153680 947758 hermes:/Volumes/music/iTunesMusic$ ls -alR|wc 15457 153666 947676 hermes:/Volumes/music/iTunesMusic$ smbclient --version Version 3.0.10 I've only seen this behavior in x86 Linux and OSX 10.3.9 but if it's present in both of these I figured it was likely to be present in all OS's and platforms so that's why I chose those settings. The directory tree in question has some unusual characters (non-ascii?) in it and that may have something to do with why this is happening. I may not have all of the charset encodings available in Linux that I should, but I don't think I have much to do with the OSX 10.3.9 kernel code. There was something else I noticed in doing this (copying a bunch of song files from a windows box to a linux box---the files were written by iTunes in OSX to an HFS+ filesystem, then moved to the windows box (NTFS), and now finally to an afs volume in Linux). There is a group of singers called Aine Minogue (I think the A should really have an accent egu or accent grave on it), and that is how iTunes created the directory (with the accent), and that is how it got stored in the ntfs filesystem on the windows box (with the accent), but when I did an ls in linux in the smbfs, what I got was the directory name _without_ the accent (literally, "Aine Minogue"). ls saw the directory (incorrectly, without the accent), but saw none of the contents of the directory. When I went to the windows box and renamed the directory, replacing the accented A with a regular A, and then went back to ls in the smbfs in linux, this time ls saw the directory and contents correctly. If I can provide more details I'd be glad to, but I'm not quite sure how to go about discovering what charset the files and directories were stored in on the ntfs. If someone can explain that to me, I'd be glad to provide those details as well. Any other details? Thank you folks for making Samba. Truly a wonderful suite of software!
Oh, forgot to add that when I did the ls -alR | less, I actually saw duplicate entries for directories in some cases and completely missed entries in other cases. This varied from time to time. That's why I finally tried the |wc experiment.
The smbfs stuff isn't longer supported. Please use the cifs Linux kernel module instead and reopen if you have the same problem with it.