Mount a remote share without sudo on Linux

2018-08-19 (original, edited on 2021-04-10)

CIFS or Samba/smb mounts require root access as smbmount or mount.cifs are programs owned by root and do not typically have their suid (set user id upon execution) bit set. There's some talk about using gvfs but it probably has some speed issues. Given the state of samba bugs including the one related to speed you might not trust them with suid but if you do you can run:

sudo chmod 4755 /bin/mount.cifs

That'll let anyone run the mount command as if they were root similar to what ping does.