Museum

Home

Lab Overview

Retrotechnology Articles

⇒ Online Manual

Media Vault

Software Library

Restoration Projects

Artifacts Sought

Related Articles

mount(2)

mtab(5)

fstab(5)

mkdisk(8)

MOUNT(8)

NAME

mount, umount − mount and dismount file system

USAGE

/etc/mount [ special name [ −r ] ]

/etc/mount −a

/etc/umount special

/etc/umount −a

DESCRIPTION

The mount command announces to the system that a removable file system is present on the device special.  The file name must not already exist.  Name becomes the name of the newly-mounted root.  The umount command announces to the system that the removable file system previously mounted on device special is to be removed. 

Both mount and umount maintain a table of mounted devices in /etc/mtab.  On DOMAIN systems, this table is a link to ‘node_data/etc.mtab. If invoked without an argument, mount prints the table. 

Before you can successfully mount a file system onto a disk, the disk’s volume must be initialized. This is accomplished by executing /com/invol on the disk. If the disk’s volume has already been initialized, you need not repeat the /com/invol execution.  (Type /com/help invol at the Bourne or C Shell prompt to receive more information about this command.) 

OPTIONS

−a Attempt to mount (unmount) all of the file systems described in /etc/fstab.  In this case, special and name are taken from /etc/fstab.  The special filename from /etc/fstab is the block special name. (This option applies to both mount and umount.) 

−r Mount the file system as read-only. (This option applies to mount only.) 

FILES

/etc/mtab mount table (link to ‘node_data/etc.mtab)

/etc/fstab file system table (link to ‘node_data/etc.mtab)

CAUTIONS

Physically write-protected filesystems as well as those on magnetic tape must be mounted read-only.  If they are not, errors will occur when access times are updated, whether or not any explicit write is attempted. 

If you mount a filesystem that contains unreadable or otherwise invalid data, unpredictable things will happen. 

RELATED INFORMATION

mount(2) mtab(5) fstab(5) mkdisk(8)

Typewritten Software • bear@typewritten.org • Edmonds, WA 98026