On Wed, 20 Nov 2002, Stefano Pogliani wrote: > What does it mean writeing to a directory "without" copying to a filesystem ? > I see that Luca has answered your questions -- just elaborating a little here:
A mount point is nothing more than an empty directory created by mkdir. When you mount a filesystem, whether on a HD, floppy, or CD, its hierarchy shows up under the mount point. Copying files to this mount point then copies files to the disk. If you unmount the filesystem then the directory is still there. For example, if you have a system setup in this way: / hda1 /home hda2 swap hda4 /home and /export are mounted filesystems under /. If you do an ls of /home, you'd see somethng like: drwx------ 6 klowe local 401 Oct 7 21:51 klowe drwx------ 6 robert remote 299 Feb 3 2001 robert drwx------ 6 wperez remote 299 Feb 3 2001 wperez If you were then to unmount /home, ls would return nothing, *unless* you happen to have copied files there when the hda2 partition was unmounted. E.g.: $> mkdir /nothing $> touch /nothing/emptyfile $> ls /nothing emptyfile $> umount /home $> mount -t ext2 /dev/hda2 /nothing $> ls /nothing drwx------ 6 klowe local 401 Oct 7 21:51 klowe drwx------ 6 robert remote 299 Feb 3 2001 robert drwx------ 6 wperez remote 299 Feb 3 2001 wperez In this example, emptyfile was create on the hda1 partition. The mount points do not need to be on the root filesystem. You can create mount points almost anywhere that has a "real" filesystem (i.e., probably not /proc -- though I admit I've never tried). So you could create a /home/external that's mounted on a separate disk. The mount point is created on hda2 in this example, but the mounted filesystem could be anywhere. This is what allows rescue disks to work. They boot up, create their own /, /usr, /lib, etc.., but then mount the damaged filesystems somewhere on their hierarchy.
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