smb-path

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pathlib-like Path object for smb protocol

Table of Contents

• About
• Installation
• Usage
• Compatibility
• License

About

Many tools make use of pathlib.Path internally. This is a problem if the files are located on a fileshare. smb-path provides wrapper of Path which acts accordingly but using the SMB protocol for file operations instead of the local hosts file system. Atm. smb-path focuses on pure reading of the data. The SMB protocol implementation of smbprotocol is used.

All the utility functions of Path should work for SmbPath as well (like the / operator, with_suffix, parents, etc.).

Currently the following SMB dependent functions are implemented:

• glob (experimental)
• iterdir
• mkdir
  • NOTE: param mode has currently no effect, it falls back to 755 !
• open
  • and hence dependent funtions like read_bytes, etc.
• stat
  • and hence dependent functions like lstat, is_file, is_dir, exists, etc.
• rename
• replace
• resolve
  • Resolves symlinks and makes relative paths absolute (latter is useless for SmbPath)
  • SMB Paths are always absolute
  • Currently just returns itself as is
• rmdir
• symlink_to
• unlink
• walk (Python 3.12+, as pathlib.Path.walk itself)
  • Supports in-place pruning of dirnames, top_down, on_error and follow_symlinks
  • Symlinks are treated like pathlib.Path.walk does, not like os.walk: with follow_symlinks=False a symlink pointing to a directory is reported in filenames

Missing operations (throwing exception) with current version (and questionable whether all of them will come) are:

• chmod
• hardlink_to
• touch

Installation

pip install smb-path

Usage

smb-path just needs to be installed. After the installation, you just use Path() to instantiate a SmbPath. It is checked whether the provided path string applies to the regex pattern r"(//|\\\\)([a-z0-9_-]+)((\.[a-z0-9_-]+)*)(\.[a-z]+)?".

The path string

• must start with // or \\
• must continue with a server name, a-z, 0-9 and _, - allowed, eg. filshr33
• optionally an arbitrary number of periods separated by a ., a-z, 0-9, _, - allowed, eg. .us.dieterscompany
• a tld with . then a-z, eg. .com is optional
• can contain trailing fileshare names, directories or files, eg. /myShare/myDir/myFile.txt

Hence //filshr33.us.dieterscompany.com/myShare/myDir/myFile.txt would be a valid SMB path.

If the pattern does not match, a Path object like you are used to it is returned (WindowsPath or PosixPath).

SMB Configuration

Use smbclient.ClientConfig to configure the SMB connection. Eg. smbclient.ClientConfig(username="itsme", password="myPW"). Refer to smbprotocol for further information.

Compatibility

smbprotocol is platform agnostic since it does not care about the path separator.

Tested with installation into a python -m venv virtual environment.

License

smb-path is distributed under the terms of the MIT license.