MOUNT(8) Linux Programmer's Manual MOUNT(8) NAME mount - mount a file system SYNOPSIS mount [-hV] mount -a [-fnrvw] [-t vfstype] mount [-fnrvw] [-o options [,...]] device | dir mount [-fnrvw] [-t vfstype] [-o options] device dir DESCRIPTION All files accessible in a Unix system are arranged in one big tree, the file hierarchy, rooted at /. These files can be spread out over sev- eral devices. The mount command serves to attach the file system found on some device to the big file tree. Conversely, the umount(8) command will detach it again. The standard form of the mount command, is mount -t type device dir This tells the kernel to attach the file system found on device (which is of type type) at the directory dir. The previous contents (if any) and owner and mode of dir become invisible, and as long as this file system remains mounted, the pathname dir refers to the root of the file system on device. Three forms of invocation do not actually mount anything: mount -h prints a help message; mount -V prints a version string; and just mount [-t type] lists all mounted file systems (of type type) - see below. The proc file system is not associated with a special device, and when mounting it, an arbitrary keyword, such as proc can be used instead of a device specification. (The customary choice none is less fortunate: the error message `none busy' from umount can be confusing.) Most devices are indicated by a file name (of a block special device), like /dev/sda1, but there are other possibilities. For example, in the case of an NFS mount, device may look like knuth.cwi.nl:/dir. The file /etc/fstab (see fstab(5)), may contain lines describing what devices are usually mounted where, using which options. This file is used in three ways: (i) The command mount -a [-t type] (usually given in a bootscript) causes all file systems mentioned in fstab (of the proper type) to be mounted as indicated, except for those whose line contains the noauto keyword. (ii) When mounting a file system mentioned in fstab, it suffices to give only the device, or only the mount point. Linux 2.0 5 July 1996 1 MOUNT(8) Linux Programmer's Manual MOUNT(8) (iii) Normally, only the superuser can mount file systems. However, when fstab contains the user option on a line, then anybody can mount the corresponding system. Thus, given a line /dev/cdrom /cd iso9660 ro,user,noauto,unhide any user can mount the iso9660 file system found on his CDROM using the command mount /dev/cdrom or mount /cd For more details, see fstab(5). The programs mount and umount maintain a list of currently mounted file systems in the file /etc/mtab. If no arguments are given to mount, this list is printed. When the proc filesystem is mounted (say at /proc), the files /etc/mtab and /proc/mounts have very similar con- tents. The former has somewhat more information, such as the mount options used, but is not necessarily up-to-date (cf. the -n option below). OPTIONS The full set of options used by an invocation of mount is determined by first extracting the options for the file system from the fstab table, then applying any options specified by the -o argument, and finally applying a -r or -w option, when present. Options available for the mount command: -v Verbose mode. -f Causes everything to be done except for the actual system call; if it's not obvious, this ``fakes'' mounting the file system. This option is useful in conjunction with the -v flag to deter- mine what the mount command is trying to do. -n Mount without writing in /etc/mtab. This is necessary for exam- ple when /etc is on a read-only file system. -r Mount the file system read-only. A synonym is -o ro. -w Mount the file system read/write. This is the default. A synonym is -o rw. -t vfstype The argument following the -t is used to indicate the file sys- tem type. The file system types which are currently supported are listed in linux/fs/filesystems.c: minix, ext, ext2, xiafs, hpfs, fat, msdos, umsdos, vfat, proc, nfs, iso9660, smb, ncp, affs, ufs, sysv, xenix, coherent. Note that the last three are equivalent and that xenix and coherent will be removed at some point in the future -- use sysv instead. Linux 2.0 5 July 1996 2 MOUNT(8) Linux Programmer's Manual MOUNT(8) The type iso9660 is the default. If no -t option is given, or if the auto type is specified, the superblock is probed for the filesystem type (minix, ext, ext2, xia, iso9660 are supported). If this probe fails and /proc/filesystems exists, then all of the filesystems listed there will be tried, except for those that are labeled "nodev" (e.g., proc and nfs). Note that the auto type may be useful for user-mounted floppies. Warning: the probing uses a heuristic (the presence of appropri- ate `magic'), and could recognize the wrong filesystem type. More than one type may be specified in a comma separated list. The list of file system types can be prefixed with no to specify the file system types on which no action should be taken. (This can be meaningful with the -a option.) For example, the command: mount -a -t nomsdos,ext mounts all file systems except those of type msdos and ext. -o Options are specified with a -o flag followed by a comma sepa- rated string of options. Some of these options are only useful when they appear in the /etc/fstab file. The following options apply to any file system that is being mounted: async All I/O to the file system should be done asynchronously. auto Can be mounted with the -a option. defaults Use default options: rw, suid, dev, exec, auto, nouser, and async. dev Interpret character or block special devices on the file system. exec Permit execution of binaries. noauto Can only be mounted explicitly (i.e., the -a option will not cause the file system to be mounted). nodev Do not interpret character or block special devices on the file system. noexec Do not allow execution of any binaries on the mounted file system. This option might be useful for a server that has file systems containing binaries for architec- tures other than its own. nosuid Do not allow set-user-identifier or set-group-identifier bits to take effect. nouser Forbid an ordinary (i.e., non-root) user to mount the file system. This is the default. Linux 2.0 5 July 1996 3 MOUNT(8) Linux Programmer's Manual MOUNT(8) remount Attempt to remount an already-mounted file system. This is commonly used to change the mount flags for a file system, especially to make a readonly file system write- able. ro Mount the file system read-only. rw Mount the file system read-write. suid Allow set-user-identifier or set-group-identifier bits to take effect. sync All I/O to the file system should be done synchronously. user Allow an ordinary user to mount the file system. This option implies the options noexec, nosuid, and nodev (unless overridden by subsequent options, as in the option line user,exec,dev,suid). FILESYSTEM SPECIFIC MOUNT OPTIONS The following options apply only to certain file systems. We sort them by file system. They all follow the -o flag. Mount options for affs uid=value and gid=value Set the owner and group of the root of the file system (default: uid=gid=0, but with option uid or gid without specified value, the uid and gid of the current process are taken). setuid=value and setgid=value Set the owner and group of all files. mode=value Set the mode of all files to value & 0777 disregarding the orig- inal permissions. Add search permission to directories that have read permission. The value is given in octal. protect Do not allow any changes to the protection bits on the file sys- tem. usemp Set uid and gid of the root of the file system to the uid and gid of the mount point upon the first sync or umount, and then clear this option. Strange... verbose Print an informational message for each successful mount. prefix=string Prefix used before volume name, when following a link. Linux 2.0 5 July 1996 4 MOUNT(8) Linux Programmer's Manual MOUNT(8) volume=string Prefix (of length at most 30) used before '/' when following a symbolic link. reserved=value (Default: 2.) Number of unused blocks at the start of the device. root=value Give explicitly the location of the root block. bs=value Give blocksize. Allowed values are 512, 1024, 2048, 4096. grpquota / noquota / quota / usrquota These options are accepted but ignored. Mount options for coherent None. Mount options for ext None. Note that the `ext' file system is obsolete. Don't use it. Mount options for ext2 The `ext2' file system is the standard Linux file system. Due to a kernel bug, it may be mounted with random mount options (Linux 2.0). bsddf / minixdf Set the behaviour for the statfs system call. The minixdf behaviour is to return in the f_blocks field the total number of blocks of the file system, while the bsddf behaviour (which is the default) is to subtract the overhead blocks used by the ext2 file system and not available for file storage. Thus % mount /k -o minixdf; df /k; umount /k Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on /dev/sda6 2630655 86954 2412169 3% /k % mount /k -o bsddf; df /k; umount /k Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on /dev/sda6 2543714 13 2412169 0% /k (Note that this example shows that one can add command line options to the options given in /etc/fstab.) check / check=normal / check=strict Set checking level. When at least one of these options is set (and check=normal is set by default) the inodes and blocks bitmaps are checked upon mount (which can take half a minute or so on a big disk). With strict checking, block deallocation checks that the block to free is in the data zone. Linux 2.0 5 July 1996 5 MOUNT(8) Linux Programmer's Manual MOUNT(8) check=none / nocheck No checking is done. debug Print debugging info upon each (re)mount. errors=continue / errors=remount-ro / errors=panic Define the behaviour when an error is encountered. (Either ignore errors and just mark the file system erroneous and con- tinue, or remount the file system read-only, or panic and halt the system.) The default is set in the filesystem superblock, and can be changed using tune2fs(8). grpid or bsdgroups / nogrpid or sysvgroups These options define what group id a newly created file gets. When grpid is set, it takes the group id of the directory in which it is created; otherwise (the default) it takes the fsgid of the current process, unless the directory has the setgid bit set, in which case it takes the gid from the parent directory, and also gets the setgid bit set if it is a directory itself. resgid=n and resuid=n The ext2 file system reserves a certain percentage of the avail- able space (by default 5%, see mke2fs(8) and tune2fs(8)). These options determine who can use the reserved blocks. (Roughly: whoever has the specified uid, or belongs to the specified group.) sb=n Instead of block 1, use block n as superblock. This could be useful when the filesystem has been damaged. Usually, copies of the superblock are found every 8192 blocks: in block 1, 8193, 16385, ... (Thus, one gets hundreds or even thousands of copies of the superblock on a big filesystem. I do not know of options to mke2fs that would cause fewer copies to be written.) grpquota / noquota / quota / usrquota These options are accepted but ignored. Mount options for fat blocksize=512 / blocksize=1024 Set blocksize (default 512). uid=value and gid=value Set the owner and group of all files. (Default: the uid and gid of the current process.) umask=value Set the umask (the bitmask of the permissions that are not pre- sent). The default is the umask of the current process. The value is given in octal. check=value Three different levels of pickyness can be chosen: Linux 2.0 5 July 1996 6 MOUNT(8) Linux Programmer's Manual MOUNT(8) r[elaxed] Upper and lower case are accepted and equivalent, long name parts are truncated (e.g. verylongname.foobar becomes verylong.foo), leading and embedded spaces are accepted in each name part (name and extension). n[ormal] Like "relaxed", but many special characters (*, ?, <, spaces, etc.) are rejected. This is the default. s[trict] Like "normal", but names may not contain long parts and special characters that are sometimes used on Linux, but are not accepted by MS-DOS are rejected. (+, =, spaces, etc.) conv=b[inary] / conv=t[ext] / conv=a[uto] The fat file system can perform CRLF<-->NL (MS-DOS text format to UNIX text format) conversion in the kernel. The following conversion modes are available: binary no translation is performed. This is the default. text CRLF<-->NL translation is performed on all files. auto CRLF<-->NL translation is performed on all files that don't have a "well-known binary" extension. The list of known extensions can be found at the beginning of fs/fat/misc.c (as of 2.0, the list is: exe, com, bin, app, sys, drv, ovl, ovr, obj, lib, dll, pif, arc, zip, lha, lzh, zoo, tar, z, arj, tz, taz, tzp, tpz, gz, tgz, deb, gif, bmp, tif, gl, jpg, pcx, tfm, vf, gf, pk, pxl, dvi). Programs that do computed lseeks won't like in-kernel text con- version. Several people have had their data ruined by this translation. Beware! For file systems mounted in binary mode, a conversion tool (fromdos/todos) is available. debug Turn on the debug flag. A version string and a list of file system parameters will be printed (these data are also printed if the parameters appear to be inconsistent). fat=12 / fat=16 Specify either a 12 bit fat or a 16 bit fat. This overrides the automatic FAT type detection routine. Use with caution! quiet Turn on the quiet flag. Attempts to chown or chmod files do not return errors, although they fail. Use with caution! sys_immutable, showexec, dots, nodots, dotsOK=[yes|no] Various misguided attempts to force Unix or DOS conventions onto Linux 2.0 5 July 1996 7 MOUNT(8) Linux Programmer's Manual MOUNT(8) a FAT file system. Mount options for hpfs uid=value and gid=value Set the owner and group of all files. (Default: the uid and gid of the current process.) umask=value Set the umask (the bitmask of the permissions that are not pre- sent). The default is the umask of the current process. The value is given in octal. case=lower / case=asis Convert all files names to lower case, or leave them. (Default: case=lower.) conv=binary / conv=text / conv=auto For conv=text, delete some random CRs (in particular, all fol- lowed by NL) when reading a file. For conv=auto, choose more or less at random between conv=binary and conv=text. For conv=binary, just read what is in the file. This is the default. nocheck Do not abort mounting when certain consistency checks fail. Mount options for iso9660 Normal iso9660 filenames appear in a 8.3 format (i.e., DOS-like restrictions on filename length), and in addition all characters are in upper case. Also there is no field for file ownership, protection, number of links, provision for block/character devices, etc. Rock Ridge is an extension to iso9660 that provides all of these unix like features. Basically there are extensions to each directory record that supply all of the additional information, and when Rock Ridge is in use, the filesystem is indistinguishable from a normal UNIX file system (except that it is read-only, of course). norock Disable the use of Rock Ridge extensions, even if available. Cf. map. check=r[elaxed] / check=s[trict] With check=relaxed, a filename is first converted to lower case before doing the lookup. This is probably only meaningful together with norock and map=normal. (Default: check=strict.) uid=value and gid=value Give all files in the file system the indicated user or group id, possibly overriding the information found in the Rock Ridge extensions. (Default: uid=0,gid=0.) map=n[ormal] / map=o[ff] For non-Rock Ridge volumes, normal name translation maps upper Linux 2.0 5 July 1996 8 MOUNT(8) Linux Programmer's Manual MOUNT(8) to lower case ASCII, drops a trailing `;1', and converts `;' to `.'. With map=off no name translation is done. See norock. (Default: map=normal.) mode=value For non-Rock Ridge volumes, give all files the indicated mode. (Default: read permission for everybody.) unhide Also show hidden and associated files. block=[512|1024|2048] Set the block size to the indicated value. (Default: block=1024.) conv=a[uto] / conv=b[inary] / conv=m[text] / conv=t[ext] (Default: conv=binary.) Since Linux 1.3.54 this option has no effect anymore. (And non-binary settings used to be very dan- gerous, often leading to silent data corruption.) cruft If the high byte of the file length contains other garbage, set this mount option to ignore the high order bits of the file length. This implies that a file cannot be larger than 16MB. The `cruft' option is set automatically if the entire CDROM has a weird size (negative, or more than 800MB). It is also set when volume sequence numbers other than 0 or 1 are seen. Mount options for minix None. Mount options for msdos See mount options for fat. If the msdos file system detects an incon- sistency, it reports an error and sets the file system read-only. The file system can be made writeable again by remounting it. Mount options for ncp Just like nfs, the ncp implementation expects a binary argument (a struct ncp_mount_data) to the mount system call. This argument is con- structed by ncpmount(8) and the current version of mount (2.5k) does not know anything about ncp. Mount options for nfs Instead of a textual option string, parsed by the kernel, the nfs file system expects a binary argument of type struct nfs_mount_data. The program mount itself parses the following options of the form `tag=value', and puts them in the structure mentioned: rsize=n, wsize=n, timeo=n, retrans=n, acregmin=n, acregmax=n, acdirmin=n, acdirmax=n, actimeo=n, retry=n, port=n, mountport=n, mounthost=name, mountprog=n, mountvers=n, nfsprog=n, nfsvers=n, namlen=n. The option addr=n is accepted but ignored. Also the following Boolean options, possibly preceded by no are recognized: bg, fg, soft, hard, intr, Linux 2.0 5 July 1996 9 MOUNT(8) Linux Programmer's Manual MOUNT(8) posix, cto, ac, tcp, udp. For details, see nfs(5). Especially useful options include rsize=8192,wsize=8192 This will make your nfs connection much faster than with the default buffer size of 1024. soft This option allows the kernel to time out if the nfs server is not responding for some time, otherwise it will try forever. The time can be specified with timeo=time. This option is useful if your nfs server sometimes doesn't respond or will be rebooted while some process tries to get a file from the server. Mount options for proc uid=value and gid=value These options are recognized, but have no effect as far as I can see. Mount options for smb Just like nfs, the smb implementation expects a binary argument (a struct smb_mount_data) to the mount system call. This argument is con- structed by smbmount(8) and the current version of mount (2.5k) does not know anything about smb. Mount options for sysv None. Mount options for ufs None. Mount options for umsdos See mount options for msdos. Mount options for vfat First of all, the mount options for fat are recognized. Furthermore, there are uni_xlate Translate unhandled Unicode characters to special escaped sequences. This lets you backup and restore filenames that are created with any Unicode characters. Without this option, a '?' is used when no translation is possible. The escape character is ':' because it is otherwise illegal on the vfat filesystem. The escape sequence that gets used, where u is the unicode charac- ter, is: ':', (u & 0x3f), ((u>>6) & 0x3f), (u>>12). posix Allow two files with names that only differ in case. Linux 2.0 5 July 1996 10 MOUNT(8) Linux Programmer's Manual MOUNT(8) nonumtail First try to make a short name without sequence number, before trying name~num.ext. Mount options for xenix None. Mount options for xiafs None. Although nothing is wrong with xiafs, it is not used much, and is not maintained. Probably one shouldn't use it. THE LOOP DEVICE One further possible type is a mount via the loop device. For example, the command mount /tmp/fdimage /mnt -t msdos -o loop=/dev/loop3,blocksize=1024 will set up the loop device /dev/loop3 to correspond to the file /tmp/fdimage, and then mount this device on /mnt. This type of mount knows about three options, namely loop, offset and encryption, that are really options to losetup(8). If no explicit loop device is mentioned (but just an option `-o loop' is given), then mount will try to find some unused loop device and use that. FILES /etc/fstab file system table /etc/mtab table of mounted file systems /etc/mtab~ lock file /etc/mtab.tmp temporary file SEE ALSO mount(2), umount(2), fstab(5), umount(8), swapon(8), nfs(5), mountd(8), nfsd(8), mke2fs(8), tune2fs(8), losetup(8) BUGS It is possible for a corrupted file system to cause a crash. Some Linux file systems don't support -o sync (the ext2fs does support synchronous updates (a la BSD) when mounted with the sync option). The -o remount may not be able to change mount parameters (all ext2fs parameters, except sb, are changeable with a remount, for example, but you can't change gid or umask for the fatfs). HISTORY A mount command appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX. Linux 2.0 5 July 1996 11