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Johannes Ernst
Asked: 2012-09-18 12:21:30 +0800 CST

What's the difference between mountall and mount -a? (Ubuntu, perhaps others)

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The mountall man page says "this is a temporary tool until init(8) itself" can do it, basically. Why not just use mount -a? Is there a difference between the two, and if so, which should I use for what?

linux

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    According to the man page, the ubuntu version of mountall does the following :

    • reads fstab(5)
    • calls fsck(8)
    • calls mount(8)
    • and calls swapon(8)

    Canonical does not provide much information on the reason why they had to build a "temporary tool".

    According to mount manual, mount -a "[...] causes all filesystems mentioned in fstab to be mounted[...]".

    Anyway, I advise you to use mount -a as it works on most unices.

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