From what I read, when mounting a network share via nautilus or gvfs-mount the mount point should be in ~/.gvfs. This seems not to be the case for me: I tried mounting both an FTP and SMB share via both nautilus and gvfs-mount under both Ubuntu Maverick and Natty and in none of the cases did I see any mount point under ~/.gvfs. I can access the shares just find in nautilus, but I want to have access via the command line, which is why I need a mount point in the file system.

Edit: Debugging following James Henstridge's answer and enzotib's comment revealed that on my laptop gvfs-fuse-daemon is running and consequently gvfs mounts show up in ~/.gvfs, whereas on the 2 workstations where ~/.gvfs remained empty gvfs-fuse-daemon was not running. On all 3 machines there are other gvfs processes running: gvfsd, gvfs-afc-volume-monitor, ...

On the laptop, mount | fgrep gvfs yields

gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/xxx/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=xxx)

That raises the questions:

• How are shares mounted without gvfs-fuse-daemon running? Is there no mount point created in that case and is every access to the share a gvfs library call? Which daemon is responsible? gvfsd?
• What's the role of gvfs-fuse-daemon? Does it only create a fuse mount point in ~/.gvfs?