Mounting AFP Volumes in a Shell

It is possible to mount AFP volumes from an ORCA, GNO, or APW shell command line. To do this, you should get the Choose utility produced by Apple. It is available on certain old Apple developer CDs, and in the Golden Orchard and Golden Grail software collections available for download here. On the Golden Orchard CD, the Choose command is available under Programming:Apple:APW & ORCA Commands:Gregs.APW.Utils. (The actual command is in the Utilities directory, and documentation is in the Documentation and Utilities:Help directories.)

Choose takes an argument of the form zone:server:volume to specify the server and volume to connect to. To connect to a server over TCP/IP, the server name is an IP address or host name, and a special zone name must be used. This is AFP over TCP, optionally followed by a parenthesized list of option codes as given in the table below. Multiple option codes should be separated by commas.

Code	Option
LR	Use Large Reads
LW	Use Large Writes
22	Force AFP Version 2.2
FS	Fake Sleep to Keep Alive
IE	Ignore Errors Setting File Types

As an example, the following command could be used to connect to a server on the local network as a guest, using large reads and large writes:

Choose -guest "AFP over TCP (LR,LW):192.168.1.10:A2FILES"

See the documentation on Choose for more information about its arguments, including how to specify a username and password.

Note that AFPBridge is currently not able to send regular ‘tickle’ messages to keep AFP connections alive when a text-based shell is active. This may cause the server to terminate the connection if there is no activity for some length of time. You can avoid this by using the FS (Fake Sleep to Keep Alive) option, if it works with your server.

AFP volumes can be unmounted using the Eject command, available in the same place as Choose.