Question

I got an old library which does some manipulation with files on floppy\ CD (transferring the files on network paths).
This library has a thread which checks on each second whether the file (e.g. the floppy diskette\ the CD disk) is mounted.

Why? What operations can be done only on mounted files?

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

To access a file in any way – read, write, execute, delete – you need to be able to specify its location. The location of a file is always its position in the directory tree, where Unix has just a single directory tree starting at a single root.

Unless the device your file is on (and hence its own (sub)directory tree) is in the “main” directory tree, it isn’t accessible.

Incorporating a device’s directory tree into the system’s “main” directory tree is what’s known in the Unix world as “mounting”.