Content

Overview

The Universal Naming Convention (UNC) is a naming standard for identifying servers, printers, and other network resources that originated in the Unix community. A UNC path uses double slashes (//) on UNIX/Linux systems, and double backslashes (\\) on Windows systems before the name of the computer sharing the resource. The path inside the computer is already separated in the usual way: on Linux systems with simple slashes "/" and on Windows systems with simple backslashes "\". Windows drive letters are not used in UNC paths.

Examples

There are several paths to UNC network can also be used to access a resource, for example:

• files
• libraries
• printers
• Samba shares (a way to share files/directories over a network)
• smart home devices shared on a local network (e.g. TV, etc.)
• etc

In the section below, we can see some examples of accessing Samba shares in Linux and Windows systems:

Linux

In a general form, we can use UNC paths in a Linux system like this:

//<hosztnév>/<megosztás-neve>/<elérési-út>

Where path is optional.

For example, we can access a Samba share in a Linux system like this:

The first example shows how to access a Samba share from previous Samba description, and the second example contains a copy of this website on my home computer ISPConfig- web account shows how to access a Samba share.

Windows

In Windows systems, we can use UNC paths in the following form:

\\<hosztnév>\<megosztás neve>\<elérési-út>

In Windows, the UNC path is often called a "network path", for example when you need to browse a network printer during its installation.

Examples:

These two examples show the same past and present Samba shares as in the examples above, only from Windows 7 and Windows 10.

Conclusion

UNC paths are therefore often used in everyday life, with the help of which we can easily access things shared on our local network, but we can also access resources on any server on the Internet.