drive mapping

Attaching a remote drive or directory on a Windows box is called "drive mapping" though the process is essentially the same as what we call mounting in the Unix world. While I rarely spend any significant time working on the Windows end of a Samba connection, I recently had an opportunity to assist a user who was tired of repeatedly having to manually connect directories from a couple of Solaris servers equipped with samba for sharing directories with select Windows desktops. The solution was to whip up a batch file that mapped the drives on login. Batch files, though far less sophisticated than their Unix shell script counterparts, nonetheless have many of the important features that I have become accustomed to working with on my Unix systems. These include such things as redirection, testable return codes, the ability to test for the existence of a file and the equivalent of /dev/null for discarding command output, errors and all.