Sharity

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In computing, Sharity is a program to allow a Unix system to mount SMB fileshares. It is developed by Christian Starkjohann of Objective Development Software GmbH and is proprietary software. The current version is 3.2.

Linux (using smbfs or cifsfs), and FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Mac OS X (using smbfs), can mount SMB natively. Most other Unix and Unix-like operating systems cannot — however, in the proprietary Unix world, Sharity is a common solution to mounting SMB shares, as the usual recommended workaround—to run Services for UNIX on the Windows file server and make the share available via NFS—is frequently unreliable in practice.

Sharity works by making an external SMB share appear to the kernel as an NFS-mounted file system. (Compare to smbclient from Samba, which either provides an FTP-like interactive shell or sends commands to the Windows file server to be executed remotely.)

The program runs on the following Unix and Unix-like operating systems: Mac OS X, IRIX, Solaris, HP-UX, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, Tru64, AIX, NEXTSTEP, OpenStep, UnixWare, SunOS 4, and Linux.

Sharity is a rewrite of an earlier program, Sharity-Light, which is free software under the GPL (having been derived from smbfs in Linux) but is limited in capabilities and is no longer developed. Sharity-Light was originally called rumba (a pun on "Samba"), but the name was trademarked to another company. Sharity-Light runs in user space rather than kernel space.