Understanding the /etc/fstab File

You may be asking whether there is a shortcut to all this mounting—a way to program recipes for all the mountable devices on a system, since chances are that all the flexibility offered by the mount tools becomes less useful over the lifetime of a system. After you figure out the commands 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. That way is the /etc/fstab file.

Take a look at the file now, using cat /etc/fstab:

 # Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass# /dev/ad0s1b none swap sw 0 0 /dev/ad0s1a / ufs rw 1 1 /dev/ad0s1g ...

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