Mount (Unix)

Before a user can access a file on a Unix-like machine, the file system that contains it needs to be mounted with the mount command. Frequently mount is used for SD card, USB storage, DVD and other removable storage devices.

The mount command instructs the operating system that a file system is ready to use, and associates it with a particular point in the overall file system hierarchy (its mount point) and sets options relating to its access. Mounting makes file systems, files, directories, devices and special files available for use and available to the user. Its counterpart umount instructs the operating system that the file system should be disassociated from its mount point, making it no longer accessible and may be removed from the computer. It is important to umount a device before removing it since changes to files may have only partially been written and are completed as part of the umount.

The mount and umount commands require root user privilege to effect changes. Alternately, specific privileges to perform the corresponding action may have been previously granted by the root user. A file system can be defined as user mountable in the /etc/fstab file by the root user.

Display all mounted partitions:

This example will mount the second partition of a HDD (hard disk drive):

and will unmount (by referring to the physical disk partition):

or (by referring to the mount point)

To remount a partition with specific options:

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 keeps the usage of 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 it to pmount.

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