Making and Mounting a File System
This lesson discusses how we can assemble a full directory tree from many underlying file systems.
We'll cover the following...
We’ve now toured the basic interfaces to access files, directories, and certain types of special types of links. But there is one more topic we should discuss: how to assemble a full directory tree from many underlying file systems. This task is accomplished via first making file systems, and then mounting them to make their contents accessible.
Making a file system
To make a file system, most file systems provide a tool, usually referred to as mkfs (pronounced “make fs”), that performs exactly this task. The idea is as follows: give the tool, as input, a device (such as a disk partition, e.g., /dev/sda1) and a file system type (e.g., ext3), and it simply writes an empty file system, starting with a root directory, onto that disk partition.
And mkfs said, let there be a file system!
Mounting a file system
However, once such a file system is created, it needs to be made accessible within the uniform file-system tree. This task is achieved via the mount program (which makes the underlying system call mount() to do the real work). What mount does, quite simply ...