Do you
want to connect to a printer down the hall, a co-worker??™s laptop in Australia, a backup
mirror on the corporate server in Shanghai, or a floppy disk in your own machine? No
problem??”with the mount command and the right permissions, all these devices and file
systems will appear on your system as if they were all just another part of your computer.
Mounting a File System 383
18
If you are the system administrator, you have near-absolute power over what file systems
appear on your system, to whom, and when. In practice, this power is exercised through
the use of the mount and umount commands, and through the /etc/fstab file governing
file systems. In this section, you will learn about each of these tools.
The mount Command
The mount command loads a file system onto your computer and makes it visible. To
mount a floppy disk, for example, insert the disk and then type the following (as
SuperUser) at the shell prompt:
mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /media/floppy
This is how the syntax breaks down (and you need all this to make it work):
. Type (-t)??”This flag and the next item identify the file system type for the platform
to be mounted (in this case, the floppy is formatted for FAT32).
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