FreeBSD6 Unleashed

Understanding the /etc/fstab File

You may be wondering whether there is a shortcut to all this mounting—a way to program “recipes” for all the mountable devices on a system—because chances are that all the flexibility offered by the mount tools will become less useful over the lifetime of a system. After you figure out the commands and esoteric device names needed to mount your second IDE hard drive, your NFS volume from across the network, your MS-DOS floppy, and your SCSI CD-ROM, do you really have to remember those commands every time you want to mount them? No, there is indeed a better way: the /etc/fstab file.

Let’s take a look at the file now, using cat /etc/fstab:

# Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass# /dev/ad0s1b none swap sw 0 ...