Linux-tutorial-4

What is Mount and How Does it Work?

All you need to know about storage device or file system mounting.

Photo by Gabriel Heinzer on Unsplash

In this short blog post, we will learn one of the basic concepts of Linux.

In Linux, the mount command is used to attach (or mount) a file system (a storage device eg. USB flash drive or hard disk) to a specified directory(eg. /usr/local) in the file system hierarchy.

This makes the files and directories of the mounted device accessible to the user and the system.

For example, if you want to access files on a USB flash drive, you need to mount the flash drive first. Once you’ve mounted the flash drive, you can navigate to the mount point (the directory where the device is mounted eg. /usr/local) and access its contents like any other directory.

The syntax of the mount command is as follows:

mount [-t <type>] [-o <options>] <device> <mount_point>

where:

• -t: specifies the type of file system (e.g. ext4, ntfs, etc.)
• -o: specifies any options for the mount operation (e.g. read-only)