Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther

Exploring External Volumes

Earlier we mentioned that additional hard disks on your system and any network-based disks are all mounted onto the filesystem in the /Volumes directory. Let’s take a closer look to see how it works:

$ ls /Volumes
110GB           Extra 30        Panther         X
$ ls -l /Volumes
total 8
drwxrwxrwx  29 taylor  staff     986 22 Sep 16:37 110GB
drwxrwxrwx  11 taylor  unknown   374  4 Sep 23:28 Extra 30
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root    admin       1 23 Sep 12:30 Panther -> /
drwxrwxr-t  61 root    admin    2074 22 Sep 16:51 X

There are four disks available, one of which is actually the root (or boot) disk: Panther. Notice that the entry for Panther is different than the others, with the first character shown an l rather than a d. This means it’s a link (see Section 4.5.6 in Chapter 4), which is confirmed by the fact that it’s shown as Panther in the regular ls output, while the value of the alias is shown in the long listing (you can see that Panther actually points to /).

If you insert a CD or DVD into the system, it will also show up as a /Volumes entry:

$ ls -l /Volumes
total 12
drwxrwxrwx  29 taylor   staff     986 22 Sep 16:37 110GB
dr-xr-xr-x   4 unknown  nogroup   136 17 Aug  2001 CITIZEN_KANE
drwxrwxrwx  11 taylor   unknown   374  4 Sep 23:28 Extra 30
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root     admin       1 23 Sep 12:30 Panther -> /
drwxrwxr-t  61 root     admin    2074 22 Sep 16:51 X

Plugging in an iPod and a digital camera proceeds as follows:

$ ls -l /Volumes total 44 drwxrwxrwx 29 taylor staff 986 22 Sep 16:37 110GB dr-xr-xr-x 4 unknown nogroup 136 17 Aug 2001 CITIZEN_KANE ...