MOUNT(1) CYGWIN MOUNT(1)NAME
- Display information about mounted filesystems, or mount a filesystem
SYNOPSISmount [OPTION] [<win32path> <posixpath>]
mount-a
mount <posixpath>
OPTIONS-a, --all
mount all filesystems mentioned in fstab
-c, --change-cygdrive-prefix
change the cygdrive path prefix to <posixpath>
-f, --force
force mount, don't warn about missing mount point directories
-h, --help
output usage information and exit
-m, --mount-entries
write fstab entries to replicate mount points and cygdrive pre‐
fixes
-o, --options X[,X...]
specify mount options
-p, --show-cygdrive-prefix
show user and/or system cygdrive path prefix
-v, --version
output version information and exit
DESCRIPTION
The mount program is used to map your drives and shares onto Cygwin's
simulated POSIX directory tree, much like as is done by mount commands
on typical UNIX systems. However, in contrast to mount points given in
/etc/fstab, mount points created or changed with mount are not persis‐
tent. They disappear immediately after the last process of the current
user exited. Please see mount-table /xref for more information on the
concepts behind the Cygwin POSIX file system and strategies for using
mounts. To remove mounts temporarily, use umount
If you just type mount with no parameters, it will display the current
mount table for you.
$ mount
c:\cygwin\bin on /usr/bin type ntfs (binary)
c:\cygwin\lib on /usr/lib type ntfs (binary)
c:\cygwin on / type ntfs (binary)
c: on /c type ntfs (binary,user,noumount)
d: on /d type fat (binary,user,noumount)
In this example, c:\cygwin is the POSIX root and D drive is mapped to
/d. Note that in this case, the root mount is a system-wide mount
point that is visible to all users running Cygwin programs, whereas the
/d mount is only visible to the current user.
The mount utility is also the mechanism for adding new mounts to the
mount table. The following example demonstrates how to mount the
directory //pollux/home/joe/data to /data for the duration of the cur‐
rent session.
$ ls /data
ls: /data: No such file or directory
$ mount //pollux/home/joe/data /data
mount: warning - /data does not exist!
$ mount
//pollux/home/joe/data on /data type smbfs (binary)
c:/cygwin/bin on /usr/bin type ntfs (binary)
c:/cygwin/lib on /usr/lib type ntfs (binary)
c:/cygwin on / type ntfs (binary)
c: on /c type ntfs (binary,user,noumount)
d: on /d type fat (binary,user,noumount)
A given POSIX path may only exist once in the mount table. Attempts to
replace the mount will fail with a busy error. The -f (force) option
causes the old mount to be silently replaced with the new one, provided
the old mount point was a user mount point. It's not valid to replace
system-wide mount points. Additionally, the -f option will silence
warnings about the non-existence of directories at the Win32 path loca‐
tion.
The -o option is the method via which various options about the mount
point may be recorded. The following options are available (note that
most of the options are duplicates of other mount flags):
acl - Use the filesystem's access control lists (ACLs) to
implement real POSIX permissions (default).
binary - Files default to binary mode (default).
cygexec - Treat all files below mount point as cygwin executables.
exec - Treat all files below mount point as executable.
noacl - Ignore ACLs and fake POSIX permissions.
nosuid - No suid files are allowed (currently unimplemented)
notexec - Treat all files below mount point as not executable.
override - Override immutable mount points.
posix=0 - Switch off case sensitivity for paths under this mount
point.
posix=1 - Switch on case sensitivity for paths under this mount
point
(default).
text - Files default to CRLF text mode line endings.
For a more complete description of the mount options and the /etc/fstab
file, see mount-table /xref.
Note that all mount points added with mount are user mount points.
System mount points can only be specified in the /etc/fstab file.
If you added mount points to /etc/fstab or your /etc/fstab.d/<user‐
name> file, you can add these mount points to your current user session
using the -a/--all option, or by specifing the posix path alone on the
command line. As an example, consider you added a mount point with the
POSIX path /my/mount. You can add this mount point with either one of
the following two commands to your current user session.
$ mount /my/mount
$ mount-a
The first command just adds the /my/mount mount point to your current
session, the mount-a adds all new mount points to your user session.
If you change a mount point to point to another native path, or if you
changed the flags of a mount point, you have to umount the mount point
first, before you can add it again. Please note that all such added
mount points are added as user mount points, and that the rule that
system mount points can't be removed or replaced in a running session
still applies.
The -m option causes the mount utility to output the current mount
table in a series of fstab entries. You can save this output as a
backup when experimenting with the mount table. Copy the output to
/etc/fstab to restore the old state. It also makes moving your settings
to a different machine much easier.
Whenever Cygwin cannot use any of the existing mounts to convert from a
particular Win32 path to a POSIX one, Cygwin will, instead, convert to
a POSIX path using a default mount point: /cygdrive. For example, if
Cygwin accesses z:\foo and the z drive is not currently in the mount
table, then z:\ will be accessible as /cygdrive/z. The mount utility
can be used to change this default automount prefix through the use of
the "--change-cygdrive-prefix" option. In the following example, we
will set the automount prefix to /mnt:
$ mount--change-cygdrive-prefix /mnt
Note that the cygdrive prefix can be set both per-user and system-wide,
and that as with all mounts, a user-specific mount takes precedence
over the system-wide setting. The mount utility creates system-wide
mounts by default if you do not specify a type. You can always see the
user and system cygdrive prefixes with the -p option. Using the
--options flag with --change-cygdrive-prefix makes all new auto‐
mounted filesystems default to this set of options. For instance
(using the short form of the command line flags)
$ mount-c /mnt -o binary,noacl
Limitations: there is a hard-coded limit of 30 mount points. Also,
although you can mount to pathnames that do not start with "/", there
is no way to make use of such mount points.
Normally the POSIX mount point in Cygwin is an existing empty direc‐
tory, as in standard UNIX. If this is the case, or if there is a place-
holder for the mount point (such as a file, a symbolic link pointing
anywhere, or a non-empty directory), you will get the expected behav‐
ior. Files present in a mount point directory before the mount become
invisible to Cygwin programs.
It is sometimes desirable to mount to a non-existent directory, for
example to avoid cluttering the root directory with names such as a,
b, c pointing to disks. Although mount will give you a warning, most
everything will work properly when you refer to the mount point explic‐
itly. Some strange effects can occur however. For example if your cur‐
rent working directory is /dir, say, and /dir/mtpt is a mount point,
then mtpt will not show up in an ls or echo * command and find . will
not find mtpt.
COPYRIGHT
Cygwin is Copyright (C) 1995-2010 Red Hat, Inc.
Cygwin is Free software; for complete licensing information, refer to:
http://cygwin.com/licensing.html
SEE ALSO
The full documentation to the Cygwin API is maintained on the web at:
http://cygwin.com/cygwin-api/cygwin-api.html
The website is updated more frequently than the man pages and should be
considered the authoritative source of information.
April 2010 MOUNT(1)
