/media versus /mnt

James Wilkinson james at westexe.demon.co.uk
Sat Nov 13 22:50:16 UTC 2004


James McKenzie wrote:
> /media is File Hierarchy Standard compliant.  /mnt is depreciated (means 
> no longer supported).  But you should be able to create /mnt mount 
> points if you feel more comfortable with them.  I have not installed 
> FC3, yet, but I think that I can get used to using /media vice /mnt.

I don't think /mnt is deprecated as such.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, Unix machines tended not to have CD drives
or floppy drives. And many Unix computers with floppies tend not to put
filesystems on them.

If you wanted to get data onto or off a Unix computer, you used a tape.
And you do *not* want to try putting a filesystem on a tape -- not when
the seek time can be measured in *hours*.

/mnt was specified as a generic place to "temporarily" mount
filesystems.

That changed. Unixes gained the ability to mount CDs and (often)
floppies, and got /cdrom, /floppy, and similar mount points.  But Linux
on multi-boot computers started getting /dos1, /dos2, and similar
mountpoints as well, and it all became a muddle. So, as I recall, Red
Hat started placing all these mount points under /mnt. And Red Hat-based
Linux distros (notably SuSE and Mandrake) followed suit.  Slackware and
Debian along with the BSDs and others didn't.

So began a flame war that earlier versions of the FHS and the FSSTND
(its predecessor) ignored (or took no position on).

/media is an attempt at a compromise: it is the old Red Hat /mnt
renamed, leaving /mnt free as a "Mount point for a temporarily mounted
filesystem".

James.
-- 
E-mail address: james | When the revolution comes, we'll need a longer wall.
@westexe.demon.co.uk  |     -- Tom De Mulder




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