Good bet.
It certainly does fail. The output of mount for that is now:

//xp0/C/$ on /mnt/C$ type cifs (rw,mand)

Reading ahead in the thread Jeff says "'\' is a valid character in posix
path components" which does explain this behaviour

Do you really need the \ in front of the $ when it is already quoted?

Reading ahead again I comment out the gsub in /etc/auto.smb which
changes the output from
-fstype=cifs,username=USER,password=PASS \
        /C "://xp0/C" \
        /ADMIN\$ "://xp0/ADMIN\$" \
        /C\$ "://xp0/C\$"

to

-fstype=cifs,username=USER,password=PASS \
        /C "://xp0/C" \
        /ADMIN$ "://xp0/ADMIN$" \
        /C$ "://xp0/C$"
    

Of course, it then doesn't escape $ in the offsets.
But, it looks like your script isn't up to date.
I'm fairly sure the current script should output:
 -fstype=cifs,username=USER,password=PASS \
         "/C" "://xp0/C" \
         "/ADMIN$" "://xp0/ADMIN$" \
         "/C$" "://xp0/C$"

which is why I thought we shouldn't need the "\" escapes.
Can you check your auto.smb against the one attached please, in
particular the last line at the bottom of the "/Disk/" block should be:

print " \\\n\t \"/" dir "\"", "\"://" key "/" loc "\""

Ian
Ian you are brilliant. You know your product very well. Thank you very much for your help

I now submit my modified version of the auto.smb script. This auto.smb script optionally supports authentication of smb/cifs shares. Only tested under Fedora 10. Based on the original script as distributed, the work in this thread and my own script.

#!/bin/sh
# This file must be executable to work! chmod 755!
# autofs samba script by Matthew Jurgens June 2009
# based on the original script distributed with autofs
# optionally uses authentication for smb/cifs shares
# mounts shares ending in $ successfully (Thanks to Ian Kent)

# optional authentication information
# either set it here or pass it in via the environment
# SMB_USER=
# SMB_PASSWORD

key="$1" # key comes is as something like a hostname eg matthew

if [ "$SMB_USER" ]; then
   opts="-fstype=cifs,username=$SMB_USER,password=$SMB_PASSWORD"

   # setup up the authentication file for smbmount
   # Sept 2008
   # Going to Fedora 9 smbmount no longer worked properly with the username%password syntax
   # Had to implement the auth file using the -A parameter
   smbauthfile=/tmp/smbauth.tmp
   echo "username=$SMB_USER" > $smbauthfile
   echo "password=$SMB_PASSWORD" >> $smbauthfile

   # set up the optional parameter for smbmount for using authentication
   auth_part="-A $smbauthfile"

else
   # set up default options - no authentication
   opts="-fstype=cifs"
fi

for P in /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin
do
    if [ -x $P/smbclient ]
    then
        SMBCLIENT=$P/smbclient
        break
    fi
done

[ -x $SMBCLIENT ] || exit 1

$SMBCLIENT $auth_part -gL $key 2>/dev/null| awk -v key="$key" -v opts="$opts" -F'|' -- '
    BEGIN    { ORS=""; first=1 }
    /Disk/    {
          if (first)
            print opts; first=0
          dir = $2
          loc = $2
          # Enclose mount dir and location in quotes
          # Double quote "$" in location as it is special
          # gsub(/\$$/, "\\$", loc);
          print " \\\n\t \"/" dir "\"", "\"://" key "/" loc "\""
        }
    END     { if (!first) print "\n"; else exit 1 }
    '
   
rm -f $smbauthfile


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