Copyright (c) 1980 Regents of the University of California.
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@(#)mount.8 6.3 (Berkeley) 08/13/88

C 4 mount, umount - mount and dismount file systems

 mount [-afrw]  mount [-frw] special | node  mount [-frw] special node 

 umount [-a]  umount special | node 

Mount announces to the system that a removable file system is present on the block device special. The file node must exist already and it must be a directory. It becomes the name of the newly mounted root. The optional arguments -r and -w indicate that the file system is to be mounted read-only or read-write, respectively. If either special or file are not provided, the appropriate information is taken from the fstab file. The -f option causes everything to be done except for the actual system call; if it's not obvious, this ``fakes'' mounting the file system.

Umount announces to the system that the removable file system node or whatever removable file system was previously mounted on device special should be removed.

If the -a option is present for either mount or umount, all of the file systems described in fstab are mounted or unmounted.

These commands maintain a list of currently mounted file systems in /etc/mtab. If invoked without an argument, mount prints the list.

Physically write-protected and magnetic tape file systems must be mounted read-only or errors will occur when access times are updated, whether or not any explicit write is attempted.

/etc/mtab mount table

/etc/fstab file system table

mount(2), fstab(5), mtab(5) Mounting garbaged file systems will crash the system.

Mounting a root directory on a non-directory makes some apparently good pathnames invalid.