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Pulling/pushing data to a samba server from Linux

smbclient (It's atrociously formatted man page is here) will let you do what ftp let you do which is to get and put files from you local machine to a samba server.

My use case is that I have a high performance cluster (Partners' Linux High Performance Computing cluster) that I want to run my code on (remoteA) while my data is on another server (remoteB) that seems to only allow access through samba and refuses ssh and scp requests.

The solution turns out to be to use smbclient, which seems to behave just like the ftp clients of old.

ssh into remoteA

smbclient \\\\{machine name}\\{share name} -D {my directory} -W{domain}

(The multiple backslashes turn out to be vital)
You'll end up with a smbc prompt. At the prompt type

prompt  (Gets rid of the prompt asking you if you are sure you want to copy or EVERY file)
recurse  (I wanted to copy a whole directory, so I needed this)
mget <my dir>\  (this is my directory)

A useful command is

smbclient -L {machine name} -W {domain}

which lists the share names available on the machine

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