.\" Copyright (c) 1980 Regents of the University of California. .\" All rights reserved. The Berkeley software License Agreement .\" specifies the terms and conditions for redistribution. .\" .\" @(#)mount.8 6.3 (Berkeley) %G% .\" .TH MOUNT 8 "" .UC 4 .SH NAME mount, umount \- mount and dismount file systems .SH SYNOPSIS .nf .B mount [-afrw] .B mount [-frw] special | node .B mount [-frw] special node .PP .B umount [-a] .B umount special | node .fi .SH DESCRIPTION .I Mount announces to the system that a removable file system is present on the block device \fIspecial\fP. The file \fInode\fP must exist already and it must be a directory. It becomes the name of the newly mounted root. The optional arguments \fI-r\fP and \fI-w\fP indicate that the file system is to be mounted read-only or read-write, respectively. If either \fIspecial\fP or \fIfile\fP are not provided, the appropriate information is taken from the \fIfstab\fP file. The \fI-f\fP option causes everything to be done except for the actual system call; if it's not obvious, this ``fakes'' mounting the file system. .PP .I Umount announces to the system that the removable file system \fInode\fP or whatever removable file system was previously mounted on device \fIspecial\fP should be removed. .PP If the \fI-a\fP option is present for either .I mount or .I umount, all of the file systems described in .I fstab are mounted or unmounted. .PP These commands maintain a list of currently mounted file systems in .I /etc/mtab. If invoked without an argument, .I mount prints the list. .PP 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. .SH FILES /etc/mtab mount table .br /etc/fstab file system table .SH "SEE ALSO" mount(2), fstab(5), mtab(5) .SH BUGS Mounting garbaged file systems will crash the system. .PP Mounting a root directory on a non-directory makes some apparently good pathnames invalid.