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| <h3 class="section">30.3 Controlling and Querying Mounts</h3> |
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| <p>All files are in filesystems, and before you can access any file, its |
| filesystem must be mounted. Because of Unix's concept of |
| <em>Everything is a file</em>, mounting of filesystems is central to doing |
| almost anything. This section explains how to find out what filesystems |
| are currently mounted and what filesystems are available for mounting, |
| and how to change what is mounted. |
| |
| <p>The classic filesystem is the contents of a disk drive. The concept is |
| considerably more abstract, though, and lots of things other than disk |
| drives can be mounted. |
| |
| <p>Some block devices don't correspond to traditional devices like disk |
| drives. For example, a loop device is a block device whose driver uses |
| a regular file in another filesystem as its medium. So if that regular |
| file contains appropriate data for a filesystem, you can by mounting the |
| loop device essentially mount a regular file. |
| |
| <p>Some filesystems aren't based on a device of any kind. The “proc” |
| filesystem, for example, contains files whose data is made up by the |
| filesystem driver on the fly whenever you ask for it. And when you |
| write to it, the data you write causes changes in the system. No data |
| gets stored. |
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| <!-- It would be good to mention NFS mounts here. --> |
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| <li><a accesskey="1" href="Mount-Information.html#Mount-Information">Mount Information</a>: What is or could be mounted? |
| <li><a accesskey="2" href="Mount_002dUnmount_002dRemount.html#Mount_002dUnmount_002dRemount">Mount-Unmount-Remount</a>: Controlling what is mounted and how |
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