Netatalk Client is a file sharing client written in C which can be used to access AFP shares exposed by multiple devices, notably personal file sharing on older Mac OS X and Classic Mac OS computers, Netatalk servers hosted on Linux/*BSD/Solaris/macOS, Apple AirPort and Time Capsule products as well as other AFP enabled NAS devices from various vendors.
Netatalk Client is an improved fork of afpfs-ng. It supports most major features of the AFP protocol v2.1 through v3.4, secure authentication, file and directory operations, filesystem extended attributes, and FUSE-based mounting of AFP shares.
You can use Netatalk Client either to mount an AFP share with FUSE, or interactively with the command-line client.
The shared library libafpclient can also be used to add AFP support to other applications. For instance, kio-afp which provides a KDE KIO worker for browsing AFP shares in Dolphin and other KDE applications.
Mount the File Sharing volume from afpserver.local on /home/myuser/fusemount authenticated as user myuser (you will be prompted for the password):
% afp_client mount --user myuser "afpserver.local:File Sharing" /home/myuser/fusemount
Get status information about all AFP volumes mounted by the current user:
% afp_client status
Unmount the volume when you are done:
% afp_client unmount /home/myuser/fusemount
Shut down the afpfs-ng management daemon (afpfsd) when no FUSE mounts are active:
% afp_client exit
There is also an alternative command mount_afpfs included for mounting by AFP URL:
% mount_afpfs "afp://myuser@afpserver.local/File Sharing" /home/myuser/fusemount
Note: Quotation marks around the AFP URL are required when spaces, colons, or other special characters are present.
The afpcmd command line client allows you to interactively access AFP shares. In the most basic use case, it takes an AFP URL as argument.
Open volume File Sharing on afpserver.local:
$ afpcmd "afp://myuser@afpserver.local/File Sharing"
Password: [input hidden]
Connected to server afpserver
afpcmd:
Connect anonymously to afpserver.local, list all volumes available to guest users:
$ afpcmd "afp://afpserver.local"
Connected to server afpserver
Not attached to a volume. Run the 'ls' command to list available volumes
afpcmd: cd Dropbox
Attached to volume Dropbox
afpcmd: ls
-rw-r--r-- 6148 2025-07-11 14:09 .DS_Store
-rw-r--r-- 108320 2025-10-12 13:59 afpfs-ng-0.9.0.tar.xz
-rw------- 0 2025-10-12 00:39 bork.txt
-rw-r--r-- 525362 2024-10-09 13:02 group_photo.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 46954 2023-08-03 02:03 Information Sheet.xlsx
drwxrwxrwx 0 2025-10-12 00:22 Scanned Documents
afpcmd:
cd to change directories, ls to list, get file to retrieve file, put file to download file, and help for a list of all supported commands.
Use afpcmd in batch mode to download files from the AFP share to the local machine:
$ afpcmd "afp://myuser@afpserver.local/File Sharing/afpfs-ng-0.9.0.tar.xz" .
Password: [input hidden]
Connected to server afpserver
Downloading file afpfs-ng-0.9.0.tar.xz
Transferred 108320 bytes in 0.015 seconds. (7200 kB/s)
Transfer complete. 108320 bytes received.
Netatalk Client has the goal of maintaining continuity with afpfs-ng commands and APIs, so that moving from one to the other is as seamless as possible. However we do not guarantee libafpclient ABI compatibility with afpfs-ng, and some differences in behavior and supported features may exist.
- afpfsd.h is now a shim header which includes afp_server.h
- afpfs-ng had to be built either with FUSE or Stateless API support, but Netatalk Client supports both simultaneously
- As a result of the above, the Stateless client controller daemon is now called afpsld instead of afpfsd to avoid namespace conflicts with the FUSE controller daemon
- mount_afp has been renamed to mount_afpfs to avoid namespace conflicts with the macOS mount_afp command
- The afpcmd command line client has been rewritten to use the Stateless API instead of implementing libafpclient calls directly, and now relies on the afpsld daemon to manage AFP sessions and connections instead of implementing its own session management
We have also introduced numerous new options and features, which will not be listed in full here but can be found in the documentation and command line help.
Netatalk Client is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2. See COPYING in this repository for the full text of the license
This project was forked from afpfs-ng by Daniel Markstedt in 2024 and renamed to Netatalk Client to serve as a companion to the Netatalk AFP file server project. afpfs-ng was created by Alex deVries in 2006 and maintained until 2009. It was in turn inspired by the 1996 Linux kernel module afpfs by Ben Hekster.
It also contains elements from a historical afpfs-ng fork created by Simon Vetter in 2015, which added IPv6 support, UTF8 support and various bug fixes from the Boxee and XBMC (Kodi) projects.
A heartfelt thank you to everyone who has contributed to making AFP a cross-platform file sharing platform over the years!