Reading an SMB Share Without Mounting

Question

I'm sure hte answer to this must be incredibly simple, but when I Google, almost every link is about mounting SMB shares.
I want to be able to read an SMB share on another system from the command line WITHOUT mounting the share.
For example, in Windows, I can type "dir \\servername\directory" and get a listing of the files on an SMB mount without having to mount it.
Can I do anything like that from the command line in OS X?  (I tried variations, like "ls //servername/directory" and did not get anything that worked.)

Answer 1

There's no support for the Microsoft \\ syntax within the various tools of the command line environment.
You're using a CIFS/SMB/Samba remote access path and particularly attempting to use a feature and syntax that is specific to Microsoft Windows (that \\ stuff) and its MS-DOS command mode.
It's probably easier (and likely best) to use Filezilla or another similar tool to remotely access the share via ftp or sftp transport or another path when the GUI is required, or to use the command-level tools scp or sftp (which can be configured for a no-password login), or to use ftp (wildly insecure, and largely incompatible with firewalls), or to simply mount (or automount) the share. 
Alternatively and if the other system involved here is remote and you're being blocked by a gateway firewall, then you might look to use a VPN into the remote network gateway or (less desirably) a VPN that's been port-forwarded into the remote server.  That can allow the volume to be mounted, and also avoids exposing CIFS/SMB/Samba to the Internet.
The most direct command-line analog to what you're trying here is the smbclient command-line tool.  For details and features and limitations of that, issue the smbclient --help command, or see the available Samba smbclient documentation.  Though it can do what you want, I"d still look to use scp or sftp (directly at the command line, or via a GUI client) or a VPN here.