Special Edition Using Linux®, Sixth Edition

Mounting Filesystems

For a newly created filesystem to be accessible in Linux, it must be mounted. Mounting filesystems dates back to the days when files were maintained on tape reels that had to be mounted before the filesystem could access them. This method of dealing with partitions makes filesystem maintenance easier, as you'll see later in the chapter.

Although the requirement to mount a filesystem seems to not be very user-friendly, it actually offers some powerful flexibility. Unlike a DOS environment, where in most cases a drive letter represents a separate partition, Linux filesystems can be logically grouped together so that they appear to be on one filesystem when in reality they aren't. This multipartition filesystem appears to the ...