mtab

The mtab (contraction of mounted file systems table) file is a system information file, commonly found on Unix-like systems. This file lists all currently mounted filesystems along with their initialization options. mtab has a lot in common with fstab, the main distinction being that the latter lists all available filesystems whereas the former lists currently mounted ones and manually mounted ones not listed in fstab. Therefore mtab is usually in a format similar to that of fstab. Most of the time it is possible to directly use lines from mtab in fstab.^[1]^[2]

The file commonly resides in /etc/mtab.

Sample mtab contents:

 /dev/sdb1 / ext3 rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 0
 proc /proc proc rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
 /sys /sys sysfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
 varrun /var/run tmpfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,mode=0755 0 0
 varlock /var/lock tmpfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,mode=1777 0 0
 udev /dev tmpfs rw,mode=0755 0 0
 devshm /dev/shm tmpfs rw 0 0
 devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,gid=5,mode=620 0 0
 lrm /lib/modules/2.6.24-16-generic/volatile tmpfs rw 0 0
 securityfs /sys/kernel/security securityfs rw 0 0
 gvfs-fuse-daemon /home/alice/.gvfs fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon rw,nosuid,nodev,user=alice 0 0

References

Unix command-line interface programs and shell builtins

File system	cat cd chmod chown chgrp cksum cmp cp dd du df file fsck fuser ln ls mkdir mount mv pax pwd rm rmdir size split tee touch type umask

Processes	at bg chroot cron fg kill killall nice pgrep pkill ps pstree time top

User environment	clear env exit finger history id logname mesg passwd su sudo uptime talk tput uname w wall who whoami write

Text processing	awk banner basename comm csplit cut diff dirname ed ex fmt fold head iconv join less more nl paste sed sort spell strings tail tr uniq vi wc xargs

Shell builtins	alias echo expr printf sleep test true and false unset wait yes

Networking	dig host ifconfig inetd netcat netstat nslookup ping rdate rlogin route ssh traceroute

Searching	find grep locate whatis whereis

Documentation	apropos help man

Miscellaneous	bc dc cal lp od

List of Unix utilities

mtab

See also

References