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Re: using mount

On Friday, March 29, 2002, at 09:15 PM, John J. Francini wrote:

In the "dumb question" department...

If MacOS X/Darwin is supposed to be "real" unix, then would it make sense to teach mount/umount to do things the way that disktool -m /disktool -u does, so that Unix admin types (like me) can use a consistent utility across most platforms? If I'm administrating a bunch of Unixes, of which MacOS X happens to be just one of several flavors, having to know that "oh, yeah, can't use mount/umount on it 'cuz it doesn't talk right to upper level apps" makes it stand out as an exception.

Would it be hard to add the disktool functionality to mount?

It would not be hard, but probably not intelligent to add full disk arbitration logic to mount and umount.

Eric

Okay, then what about making mount/umount actually go off and do a fork/exec of disktool "behind the scenes", as it were? What I don't seem to understand is the reticence in making mount/umount the standard command, even if it ends up having to call other tools to do its work.

There's precedent for making the mount/umount commands "front-ends" for other programs that do the work on a filesystem-type by filesystem-type basis in some OSes. Tru64 UNIX, for example, has a single command interface for dealing with disks -- mount/umount. Depending on what it's mounting, it calls various subprograms to do the actual dirty work:

o UFS: handles internally
o AdvFS (log-based filesystem): mount_advfs
o CDFS: mount_cdfs
o MFS (ram disk): mount_mfs
o NFS: mount_nfs

None of these programs can be run interactively; they're all run indirectly after mount/umount has parsed the command line.

Net result: easier administration since the command interface is very similar to all the other UNIXes.

--
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John Francini <mailto:email@hidden>
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