5.9.3.2. Seeing What is Mounted

In addition to mounting and unmounting disk space, it is possible to see what is mounted. There are several different ways of doing this:
  • Viewing /etc/mtab
  • Viewing /proc/mounts
  • Issuing the df command
5.9.3.2.1. Viewing /etc/mtab
The file /etc/mtab is a normal file that is updated by the mount program whenever file systems are mounted or unmounted. Here is a sample /etc/mtab: 
 /dev/sda3 / ext3 rw 0 0 none /proc proc rw 0 0 usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs rw 0 0 /dev/sda1 /boot ext3 rw 0 0 none /dev/pts devpts rw,gid=5,mode=620 0 0 /dev/sda4 /home ext3 rw 0 0 none /dev/shm tmpfs rw 0 0 none /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw 0 0

Note

The /etc/mtab file is meant to be used to display the status of currently-mounted file systems only. It should not be manually modified.
Each line represents a file system that is currently mounted and contains the following fields (from left to right):
  • The device specification
  • The mount point
  • The file system type
  • Whether the file system is mounted read-only (ro) or read-write (rw), along with any other mount options
  • Two unused fields with zeros in them (for compatibility with /etc/fstab[24])