On unix systems, the normal way to access files is to mount the location that contains them. Files thus appear at some point in the directory hierarchy, under the directory that is the mount point for the filesystem that contains them.
There are several ways to access files on another computer, depending on which protocol is used to authenticate and transfer data. For a “networked folder” that operating systems such as Windows use, the protocol is SMB, usually known in the unix world as Samba (which is the name of the Linux implementation of the protocol). The easiest way to mount a Samba volume is with a GUI: use a menu item like “open network location” (or similar wording) in file browsers such as Nautilus, Konqueror, etc. You can also mount a Samba volume on the command line, with mount.cifs
(requires root permissions on some platforms) or gvfs-mount
(from the Gnome virtual filesystem tool suite) or smbnetfs.
You can also access remote files over Samba without mounting using a program dedicated to network transfers, such as smbclient
(part of the Samba tool suite).
If the remote machine is also a unix machine, it may be easier to set up access with SSH. If you can run commands on the other machine with SSH, you can use scp
or sftp
to transfer files. You can also use sshfs to mount the remote location over the SFTP protocol. This is a completely different protocol: ssh talks to an ssh server, Samba talks to an SMB server.
man mount.cifs
.