I'm the new maintainer of pam_mount, a PAM module that allows SMB (and other types of) volumes to be mounted for a user when he logs in using his system password. In the past, pam_mount has passed a volume password to smbmount using the -P parameter or PASSWD environment variable. This is not acceptable, as any user can learn other's passwords with some creative ps usage. However, smbmount does not currently allow a more secure means to enter passwords. Using a credentials file is not really appropriate for pam_mount either. Pam_mount needs to be able to get the system password from PAM and ship it off to smbmount somehow. A static password file does not really work nicely. Mount allows passwords to be read from stdin if the -p parameter is used: mount -p0 ... The number is the file descriptor to read the password from. Could you implement a similar option in smbmount? When the current version of smbmount prompts for a password, it tries to read it from /dev/tty. Allowing a user to tell smbmount to read its password from stdin would make smbmount more flexible in pipelines. -- Mike :wq