testparm — check an smb.conf configuration file for internal correctness
testparm [-s] [-h] [-v] [-L <servername>] [-t <encoding>] {config filename} [hostname hostIP]
This tool is part of the Samba(7) suite.
testparm is a very simple test program to check an smbd(8) configuration file for internal correctness. If this program reports no problems, you can use the configuration file with confidence that smbd will successfully load the configuration file.
Note that this is NOT a guarantee that the services specified in the configuration file will be available or will operate as expected.
If the optional host name and host IP address are specified on the command line, this test program will run through the service entries reporting whether the specified host has access to each service.
If testparm finds an error in the smb.conf file it returns an exit code of 1 to the calling program, else it returns an exit code of 0. This allows shell scripts to test the output from testparm.
Without this option, testparm will prompt for a carriage return after printing the service names and before dumping the service definitions.
Print a summary of command line options.
Prints the program version number.
Sets the value of the %L macro to servername. This is useful for testing include files specified with the %L macro.
If this option is specified, testparm will also output all options that were not used in smb.conf(5) and are thus set to their defaults.
Output data in specified encoding.
This is the name of the configuration file to check. If this parameter is not present then the default smb.conf(5) file will be checked.
If this parameter and the following are specified, then testparm will examine the hosts allow and hosts deny parameters in the smb.conf(5) file to determine if the hostname with this IP address would be allowed access to the smbd server. If this parameter is supplied, the hostIP parameter must also be supplied.
This is the IP address of the host specified in the previous parameter. This address must be supplied if the hostname parameter is supplied.
This is usually the name of the configuration file used by smbd(8).
The program will issue a message saying whether the configuration file loaded OK or not. This message may be preceded by errors and warnings if the file did not load. If the file was loaded OK, the program then dumps all known service details to stdout.
This man page is correct for version 3.0 of the Samba suite.
The original Samba software and related utilities were created by Andrew Tridgell. Samba is now developed by the Samba Team as an Open Source project similar to the way the Linux kernel is developed.
The original Samba man pages were written by Karl Auer.
The man page sources were converted to YODL format (another
excellent piece of Open Source software, available at