[email protected] wrote: > You wrote: Any partition (actually, the filesystem) can be mounted as any > directory. > > What are the commands to mount a partition as a directory please? > > I am a bit confused: the file system consists of partitions such a / , /boot > , /home , /var , /etc and so on..... Don't they appear as directories?
Let's clarify some terminology. A disk is a permanent storage device, regardless of whether it's a spinning hard disk, a solid-state disk, or some new technology. Disks need a filesystem (what Windows calls a format) written to them to organize the data. There are filesystems which use raw disks, but most want or can use a partitioning scheme that separates areas of the disk so that multiple filesystems can share it. There are also filesystems that span multiple disks. "The" filesystem is the tree that the kernel builds at boot time, starting with a / entry and creating directories underneath it, and mounting other filesystems in the place of some of those directories. Most of that gets done automatically because the system has a configuration file that says: mount a filesystem of this kind, identified that way, at this location. And you can also mount filesystems by hand, if you have root permissions: mount -t ext4 /dev/sdb3 /mnt/foobar means an Extended-4 filesystem, located at the third partition of the second SCSI-class disk, to be joined at /mnt/foobar. mount -t swap /dev/sda6 means a filesystem prepared to act as swap space, located at the sixth partition of the first SCSI-class disk, to be joined into the special swap system. Special systems may also create apparent filesystems with no physical disks behind them: tmpfs makes a filesystem in RAM, procfs makes a filesystem that dynamically shows process information, sysfs makes a filesystem that dynamically shows kernel system information. You probably want to read https://debian-handbook.info/ -dsr-
