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.
You can use Netatalk Client either to mount an AFP share with FUSE, or interactively with the command-line client.
The AFP client library can also be used to add AFP support to other applications. For instance, kio-afp provides a KDE KIO worker for browsing AFP shares in Dolphin and other KDE applications, using the libafpclient shared library.
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 is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2. See COPYING in this repository for the full text of the license
It was forked from afpfs-ng by Daniel Markstedt in 2024.
afpfs-ng was created by Alex deVries in 2006. 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.
afpfs-ng was in turn inspired by afpfs which is a Linux kernel extension for AFP created by Ben Hekster in 1996.
A heartfelt thank you to everyone who has contributed to making AFP a cross-platform file sharing platform over the years!