site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com On May 6, 2005, at 5:00 PM, Erich Ocean wrote: [g5:~] me% mount devfs on /dev (local) fdesc on /dev (union) Attempting to mess with /dev at all is pretty much folly. :) The volume for "dev" cannot be found. _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-kernel mailing list (Darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-kernel/site_archiver%40lists.a... I've got a missing volume (named 'dev') in my root directory, that I can't delete in the Finder. I've cut out lines describing other mount points; real output of 'mount' is longer. Anyways, devfs and fdesc are virtual filesystems which get mounted on /dev. You cannot delete /dev (or any other directory which is in use as a mount point) as long as there's something mounted on it. If there was not something mounted on /dev, your computer would soon stop working well, because the device nodes which the kernel presents in devfs are essential to the operation of many programs. Attempting to delete it from the command line is folly, since it's the "dev" directory. The Finder thinks it's an alias, and it gives the following error message when I click on it: Insert the volume for "dev" and wait for it to appear on the desktop, then try again. [OK] Any ideas on how I can get rid of this thing? It doesn't show up when I ls -l from my root directory, only the normal dev directory shows up. The Finder is just confused. You have to have changed or removed its list of hidden files/folders to see /dev at all; by doing so you're exposing a bug that's no doubt due to the fact that Apple regards the Finder as a place where users should never even try to see UNIX arcana like /dev, and therefore has never tested it for such usage. The reason for its confusion probably has to do with the way that the Finder tries to present the UNIX single-root filesystem as if it were the mulitply-rooted filesystem of MacOS 9 and earlier. In order to do this, it tries to special-case all mounted filesystems instead of just listing directory contents. It would seem that this code doesn't account for mounts outside the ordinary places where network disks and local disks are mounted. Either that or it just doesn't know how to handle the union mount of devfs and fdesc on the same mount point. This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com