bashmount: Another seemingly roundabout solution

Mounting volumes from the console, without the need for background daemons or automounting tools, has been near the forefront of my Linux experience for years now. If it makes any difference, I’ve tried other options but still rely on mostly the same solution and setup that I did eight years ago.

Which could mean I am stuck in my ways, old-fashioned or just haven’t found a better solution yet. Or it could mean I don’t see any need to reinvent things — if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Adding a mount point to /etc/fstab and allowing any user to mount it seems to do the trick. I’ll let you know if it stops. 😉

It’s not a very flashy way to handle things though, and if you want something with a little more pizazz, bashmount might deliver for you.

 

As you can see, bashmount gives you a full array of attached volumes and their status, as well as options for even more information. A lot more than my hotwired solution, anyway.

And further, bashmount doesn’t need any fancy daemon packages or weird dependencies, and as far as I can tell, will do its job with only bash as a background framework. Supposedly it will work with udisks2, or some automounting tools, but I didn’t test it on that point.

Although it’s informative, and pretty, and colorful, and easy to use … I don’t think I’ll be adopting it over my home-grown solution.

For one thing, it doesn’t seem to eliminate the need for my fstab solution, since attempting to mount to an unlisted location triggers an error asking for root access. Well, in that case, it would just be quicker to su to root and do things manually.

So again I have a fairly clever tool that seems to do what it’s told, but using it implies a step or two in a roundabout direction before arriving at the same destination. Sort of along the same vein as xcv, which we talked about a week ago.

It may be that you can coax bashmount into avoiding those root permissions requests, or it may be that bashmount works as you expect without any heavy editing on your part. If that’s the case, I encourage you to use bashmount for as long as it satisfies.

I think I shall stick with my direct and straight solution. Not that bashmount doesn’t scratch the itch, only that there wasn’t an itch to start with.