Re: fstab vs. mtab

[John Pearson <huiac@camtech.net.au>]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2000 at 03:19:47PM -0800, Alex McCool wrote
> Could someone explain the diff between fstab and mtab?

In a nutshell:
  fstab is created and maintained by the superuser, and 
  describes/provides defaults for filesystems to be mounted.

  mtab is created and maintained by the system, and describes
  filesystems which are currently mounted.

Fstab usually includes all your "regular" partitions that are
mounted automatically, plus (on Linux) entries for /proc, swap
and /dev/ptys.  It can also contain any other mounts that may
be useful (/cdrom, /fd0) with the "noauto" option (so that they
won'tbe mounted automatically), so that you can say, e.g.,
 # mount /cdrom
to pick up the mount options from /etc/fstab, instead of
 # mount -t iso9660 -o ro,nodev,nosuid /dev/hdb /cdrom

You should never edit /etc/mtab yourself.


John P.
-- 
huiac@camtech.net.au
john@huiac.apana.org.au
"Oh - I - you know - my job is to fear everything." - Bill Gates in Denmark