mnttab.4 (2010 09)

mnttab(4) mnttab(4)

NAME

mnttab - mounted ﬁle system table

SYNOPSIS

#include <mntent.h>

DESCRIPTION

mnttab resides in directory /etc and contains a table of devices mounted by the

mount command (see

mount(1M)). The ﬁle contains a line of information for each mounted ﬁlesystem which is structurally

identical to the contents of

/etc/fstab described by fstab (4).

There are a number of lines of the form:

special_ﬁle_name dir type opts freq passno mount_time

consisting of entries similar to:

/dev/dsk/c0d0s0 / hfs rw 0 1 537851723

/etc/mnttab

is accessed by programs that use

getmntent() (see getmntent (3X)). It should never be

manually edited or overwritten.

mount_time contains the time the ﬁle system was mounted using

mount. Its value is the number of

seconds since the Epoch (00:00:00 Coordinated Universal Time, January 1, 1970 (see time (2).

The

mnttab ﬁle is a pseudo-ﬁle whose contents are dynamically created based on the kernel’s private

in-core mount table. The ﬁle will always reﬂect the latest ﬁle system

mount and umount operations.

syncer rewrites the mnttab ﬁle if it is found to be deleted or corrupted. (see syncer (1M)).

WARNINGS

The table is provided only as a means for programs to return information about mounted ﬁle systems.

/etc/mnttab should never be edited, either with a text editor or with the delmntent (3X) and

addmntent (3X) API’s. The kernel will ignore all writes to /etc/mnttab

, so these API’s will return suc-

cess even though they do not actually modify

/etc/mnttab.

AUTHOR

mnttab was developed by the University of California, Berkeley, Sun Microsystems, Inc., and HP.

FILES

/etc/mnttab