I stayed up late last night making a patch to the Linux ‘mount’ command. I was trying to get the system to mount disks via their volume labels rather than specifying the exact device to use. This is important for hot-pluggable drives, since you never know what order they're going to show up in. Depending on when I plug in my external FireWire drive and my digital camera, they can show up as either /dev/sda or /dev/sdb in the Linux nomenclature. This is similar to how drives magically pop up as the next available drive letter in Windows.
Anyway, mounting devices via their label makes it so I don't have to know the proper name -- the computer figures it out for me. Well, as long as I've remembered to label things uniquely.
I got the label support working for the Linux-native disk format, but I need to do some work if I want it to work with Windows-format disks. The Debian maintainer of mount has labeled that support as ‘wishlist’, so it's unlikely he'd fix it..
Posted by mike at May 13, 2003 11:51 AM | Software | TrackBack