Making and Mounting a File System

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 is take an existing directory as a target mount point and essentially paste a new file system onto the directory tree at that point.

An example here might be useful. Imagine we have an unmounted ext3 file system, stored in device partition /dev/sda1, that has the following contents: a root directory which contains two sub-directories, a and b, each of which in turn holds a single file named foo. Let’s say we wish to mount this file system at the mount point /home/users. We would type something like this: