Mount

The Unix command line utility mount instructs the operating system a file system is ready to use, and associates it with a particular point in the system's file system hierarchy (its mount point). The counterpart umount [sic] instructs the operating system that the file system should be disassociated from its mount point, making it no longer accessible. The mount and umount commands require root user privilege or the corresponding fine-grained privilege, unless the file system is defined as "user mountable" in the /etc/fstab file (which can only be modified by the root user).

Example

The second partition of a hard disk is mounted with the command:

   $ mount /dev/hda2 /new/subdir

and unmounted with the command:

   $ umount /dev/hda2

or

   $ umount /new/subdir

To list all mounted file systems:

   $ mount

To remount a partition with specific options:

   $ mount -o remount,rw /dev/hda2

To mount an ISO file (Linux):

  $ mount -o loop <isofile-source> <mount-point>

To mount all filesystems listed in fstab:

   $ mount -a

pmount

pmount is a wrapper around the standard mount program which permits normal users to mount removable devices without a matching /etc/fstab entry. This provides a robust basis for automounting frameworks like GNOME's Utopia project and confines the amount of code that runs as root to a minimum.

This package also contains a wrapper "pmount-hal" which reads information such as device labels and mount options from HAL and passes them to pmount.

To configure, the administrator would add a list of devices to /etc/pmount.allow that non-root users can mount:

echo /media/cdrom >> /etc/pmount.allow &&
echo /media/dvd >> /etc/pmount.allow &&
echo /media/thumbdrive >> /etc/pmount.allow

gnome-mount

The gnome-mount package contains programs for mounting, unmounting and ejecting storage devices. The goal for gnome-mount is for GNOME software such as gnome-volume-manager and GNOME-VFS to use this instead of invoking mount/umount/eject or direct HAL invoking methods.

All the gnome-mount programs utilize HAL methods and as such run unprivileged. The rationale for gnome-mount is to have a centralized place (in GConf) where settings such as mount options and mount locations are maintained. ^[1]

See also

• Mount (computing)
• List of Unix programs

References

1. ^ gnome-mount-0.6

External links

• mount(8) – Linux man page
• pmount.
• mount examples.

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