list of characters that have to be escaped in passwords for "mount -t smbfs //username:password@..."

Question

I am trying to mount a share with the macOS CLI using zsh as my shell.

mount -t smbfs //user:password@host/share /share

Mounting the share without specifying the password works. But then I have to enter the password manually. As soon as I pass the password via the command line, I get an error message. I have a very strong password with many special characters, such as .()[]{}<>*=.

mount_smbfs: URL parsing failed, please correct the URL and try again: Invalid argument
mount: /share failed with 64

Placing the password in single or double quotes does not solve the problem. I assume that I have to enter the password without quotes and escape some of these special characters. Where can I find a list of characters that have to be escaped in passwords (or cannot be used at all)?

Answer 1

I finally solved the problem differently. I changed to SSH key-based authentication, which is probably even safer than a long password with many special characters.

Answer 2

Apple programs this into swift for which characters are allowed in the password field for a URL. Not entirely sure if this helps for the smbfs mount but it’s what I would use to have swift encode my password if I were passing it as you do in the command.

• https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nscharacterset/1417313-urlpasswordallowed

To implement this in code, you could use swift, php or python and these links covering specific of doing the url encoding and seeing if that alone help with escaping and quoting.

• encoding with swift and NSCharacterSet
• Encoding with python
• Encoding with php