Where is my 2G? - MC

[Florian Diesch]

Brian Astill <bastill at adam.com.au> wrote:

> On Friday 13 April 2007 15:13, Patton Echols wrote:
>> >> Interesting, Scott.  For those of us clueless . . . If he
>> >> mistakenly tells mc to send to an unmounted partition, what
>> >> is the design behavior?
>
> May I share what I have remembered/learned from this thread?
> 1. /mnt is almost exclusively described in the 
> context  "mount /dev/something /mnt/something"
> 2. This gives the impression that /mnt and its sub-directories are 
> special - but they aren't.
> 3. You can read write copy whatever files to /mnt and its 
> sub-directories just as you could with any other directory.
> 4.  It is only the mount command that makes /mnt special.
> 5. Mount says "I want to look at a place outside my system.
> Make yourself into a door through which I can converse with it."
> 6. Mount can also say "It's getting crowded in here.  There is 
> empty space over there.  Open a door to that empty space, so I 
> can store stuff there."

It's more like putting directory trees together

Let's say you have a directory tree like this

/
|-- bin
|-- boot
|-- dev
|-- etc
|-- home
|-- initrd
|-- lib
|-- lost+found
|-- media
|-- mnt
|   `-- hdb7
|-- opt
|-- proc
...


and on hdb7 there's a tree like this:
.
|-- Desktop
|-- Mail
|-- News
|-- bin
|-- doc
|   |-- work
|   |-- home
|-- music
    |-- mp3
    |-- ogg
...


Now if you mount /dev/hdb7 at /mnt/hdb7 that means "put the
/dev/hdb7's directory tree on /mnt/hdb7". So you'll get

/
|-- bin
|-- boot
|-- dev
|-- etc
|-- home
|-- initrd
|-- lib
|-- lost+found
|-- media
|-- mnt
|   `-- hdb7
|       |-- Desktop
|       |-- Mail
|       |-- News
|       |-- bin
|       |-- doc
|       |   |-- work
|       |   `-- home
|       |-- music
|           |-- mp3
|           `-- ogg
|    ...
|-- opt
|-- proc
...

It's no magic doorway, the files at /mnt/hdb7/* are there just like the
files at /* are.

You may use any other directory instead of /mnt/hdb7 for mounting
/dev/hdb7, e.g. /mnt/hda1, /media/something, /home/, ...





   Florian
-- 
<http://www.florian-diesch.de/>