How to Provide Credentials From a File While Mounting CIFS Share in Linux

Question: How to use a FILE instead of directly providing the username/password while mounting CIFS share.

Let us assume the below,

1. The Windows Machine IP is “10.176.x.x”
2. Windows Folder to be mounted is called ‘data’
3. Planning to Mount the Windows share to a Linux folder called ‘/mnt’
4. The credential file created on Linux machine is called ‘/root/cifs_creds’

Below are the entry inside the file:

username=geek
password=xxyyzz

Now run the ‘mount’ command on Linux box as below:

# mount -t cifs //10.176.x.x/data /mnt -o credentials=/root/cifs_creds