I run into UNC paths fairly often and they can be a pain to deal with on OS X. So I wrote a little text service action that helps with this problem.
After you set this up, you will be able to highlight any text in a text field, right click and have the text converted from a UNC path to a smb:// style URL. This is especially helpful when using these in Finder with the Go -> Connect to Server dialog box.
To use this:
- Open Automator
- Select File -> New
- For the document type, choose "Service"
- Add the "Run Shell Script" action
- From the shell dropdown, choose Python
- Paste in the uncconvert.py attached to this gist
- Save. Name it something like UNC to SMB
Now when you right click on selected text in a text field in pretty much any application on OS X you can right click, choose "Services". Then select UNC to SMB and your UNC path will be converted.