SWAT is a facility that is part of the Samba suite. The main executable is called swat and is invoked by the internetworking super daemon. See appropriate section for details.

SWAT uses integral Samba components to locate parameters supported by the particular version of Samba. Unlike tools and utilities that are external to Samba, SWAT is always up to date as known Samba parameters change. SWAT provides context-sensitive help for each configuration parameter, directly from man page entries.

Some network administrators believe that it is a good idea to write systems documentation inside configuration files, and for them SWAT will always be a nasty tool. SWAT does not store the configuration file in any intermediate form; rather, it stores only the parameter settings, so when SWAT writes the smb.conf file to disk, it writes only those parameters that are at other than the default settings. The result is that all comments, as well as parameters that are no longer supported, will be lost from the smb.conf file. Additionally, the parameters will be written back in internal ordering.