Autofs ignores mounts following a non existent map file in auto.master in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Issue

• In case a map included in auto.master doesn't exist, all subsequent mounts following that map will be ignored.
• Consider the following snippet in /etc/auto.master where /etc/auto.master1 doesn't exist.

/home  /etc/auto.home
+/etc/auto.master1
/misc  /etc/auto.misc

In this case, the autofs mount /home is loaded but /misc is ignored.