Windows – script to map network drive

Use this at your own risk. (I have tested it on XP and Server 2008 x64 R2)

For this hack you will need SysinternalsSuite by Mark Russinovich:

Step one: Open an elevated cmd.exe prompt (Run as administrator)

Step two: Elevate again to root using PSExec.exe: Navigate to the folder containing SysinternalsSuite and execute the following command psexec -i -s cmd.exe you are now inside of a prompt that is nt authority\system and you can prove this by typing whoami. The -i is needed because drive mappings need to interact with the user

Step Three: Create the persistent mapped drive as the SYSTEM account with the following command net use z: \\servername\sharedfolder /persistent:yes

It's that easy!

WARNING: You can only remove this mapping the same way you created it, from the SYSTEM account. If you need to remove it, follow steps 1 and 2 but change the command on step 3 to net use z: /delete.

NOTE: The newly created mapped drive will now appear for ALL users of this system but they will see it displayed as "Disconnected Network Drive (Z:)". Do not let the name fool you. It may claim to be disconnected but it will work for everyone. That's how you can tell this hack is not supported by M$.

me=`basename "$0"`

For reading through a symlink¹, which is usually not what you want (you usually don't want to confuse the user this way), try:

me="$(basename "$(test -L "$0" && readlink "$0" || echo "$0")")"

IMO, that'll produce confusing output. "I ran foo.sh, but it's saying I'm running bar.sh!? Must be a bug!" Besides, one of the purposes of having differently-named symlinks is to provide different functionality based on the name it's called as (think gzip and gunzip on some platforms).

¹ That is, to resolve symlinks such that when the user executes foo.sh which is actually a symlink to bar.sh, you wish to use the resolved name bar.sh rather than foo.sh.