Mounting File Systems Under Linux Academy

/mnt This is a generic mount point under which you mount your filesystems or devices. Mounting is the process by which you make a filesystem available to the system. After mounting your files will be accessible under the mount-point. This directory usually contains mount points or sub-directories where you mount your floppy and your CD. You can also create additional mount-points here if you wish. Standard mount points would include /mnt/cdrom and /mnt/floppy.

There is no limitation to creating a mount-point anywhere on your system but by convention and for sheer practicality do not litter your file system with mount-points. It should be noted that some distributions like Debian allocate /floppy and /cdrom as mount points while Redhat and Mandrake puts them in /mnt/floppy and /mnt/cdrom respectively. However, it should be noted that as of FSSTND version 2.3 the purpose of this directory has changed. This directory is provided so that the system administrator may temporarily mount a filesystem as needed. The content of this directory is a local issue and should not affect the manner in which any program is run. This directory must not be used by installation programs: a suitable temporary directory not in use by the system must be used instead.

Learn how to remount filesystem in read write mode under Linux. Article also explains how to check if file system is read only and how to clean file system. Learn how to remount filesystem in read write mode under Linux. Article also explains how to check if file system is read only and how to clean file system. Learn how to re mount.

Mounting and unmounting Before one can use a filesystem, it has to be mounted. The operating system then does various bookkeeping things to make sure that everything works. Since all files in UNIX are in a single directory tree, the mount operation will make it look like the contents of the new filesystem are the contents of an existing subdirectory in some already mounted filesystem. The mounts could be done as in the following example: $ mount /dev/hda2 /home $ mount /dev/hda3 /usr $ The mount command takes two arguments. The first one is the device file corresponding to the disk or partition containing the filesystem.

The second one is the directory below which it will be mounted. After these commands the contents of the two filesystems look just like the contents of the /home and /usr directories, respectively. One would then say that `` /dev/hda2 is mounted on /home', and similarly for /usr. To look at either filesystem, one would look at the contents of the directory on which it has been mounted, just as if it were any other directory.

Systems

Note the difference between the device file, /dev/hda2, and the mounted-on directory, /home. The device file gives access to the raw contents of the disk, the mounted-on directory gives access to the files on the disk. The mounted-on directory is called the mount point.

Linux supports many filesystem types. Mount tries to guess the type of the filesystem. You can also use the -t fstype option to specify the type directly; this is sometimes necessary, since the heuristics mount uses do not always work. For example, to mount an MS-DOS floppy, you could use the following command: $ mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /floppy $ The mounted-on directory need not be empty, although it must exist. Any files in it, however, will be inaccessible by name while the filesystem is mounted. (Any files that have already been opened will still be accessible. Files that have hard links from other directories can be accessed using those names.) There is no harm done with this, and it can even be useful.

For instance, some people like to have /tmp and /var/tmp synonymous, and make /tmp be a symbolic link to /var/tmp. Cara install script di greasemonkey facebook scripts. When the system is booted, before the /var filesystem is mounted, a /var/tmp directory residing on the root filesystem is used instead. When /var is mounted, it will make the /var/tmp directory on the root filesystem inaccessible.