Reading Live SMB Files

[Adam Voigt]

It had never bothered me before, but I was opening a PDF document for
someone off the file server and it told me that "xpdf" couldn't read the
file off SMB shares, so I had to copy it to my desktop to open it.
Someone watching me do this asked why I had to, and I didn't really have
a reason, so I thought I'd ask here.

Why is it exactly you can't directly open files off SMB shares like you
can on Windows? I'm sure it's probably something simple like Nautilus
just uses "smbclient" instead of mounting the share or something like
that, but why couldn't it just copy the file to /tmp when you try and
access it, to make it more fluid browsing?

-- 

Adam Voigt
adam at kotisprop.com