FHS & /misc

[worker201]

I was just looking through the FHS, and I didn't see Fedora's top-level directory /misc in there. So now I am wondering exactly what it does, and where I might find some documentation on it.

[Void Main]

If you do an "rpm -qif /misc" you will see that it belongs to the "autofs" package. See "man 8 autofs", "man 5 autofs", "man 5 auto.master", "man 8 automount", etc. I think /misc is pretty standard for automount on most distros (from memory). I know it's been in Red Hat for as long as I can remember.

[worker201]

The manpages explain how it is done, but not why it is done. Everything that gets mounted seems to be mounted in a more reasonable place, like /mnt or /media.

Are there other things besides disks that can be 'mounted'?

[Void Main]

Yes, disks, network shares (nfs, smb, etc), usb devices, cds, floppies, etc. The thing is, you'll probably find that autofs isn't really doing any of the mounting on your system. The things you talk about being mounted under /media etc are mounted by other programs like gnome-volume-manager (yes, figure that one out). automount I think is more the "old" way to do it and if you want this type of functionality on a server not running a windowing environment then autofs might be more for you. I may be a little off on my assumptions but I think that's about right. Also, I think automount comes from more traditional UNIX (I know Sun has been using it for a long time).