There are many ways to fetch the list of currently-mounted-devices: read the files /etc/mtab, /proc/mounts, or exec /bin/mount, /bin/df.

I've been arguing with a colleague (Yaniv), that relying on /etc/mtab is no much worse than relying on /proc/mounts. But after we inspected it on Linux & Solaris (/etc/mnttab), I figured out that I was pretty wrong, and learned some new surprising facts:

On Linux:

• /proc/mounts is a read-only, kernel-generated file.
• /etc/mtab (Linux) is a regular file. It's kept up-to-date because the mount/umount commands modify it. It can be modified by a root user, moved and even deleted!
• df command is using /etc/mtab, thus after rm'ing /etc/mtab, df would stop functioning.
• mount command doesn't care about /etc/mtab, probably uses /proc/mounts or some internal kernel structure.

On Solaris (prepare for some weird stuff now):

• Solaris has got /etc/mnttab, but no /proc/mounts equivalent.
• /etc/mnttab is a mounted filesystem, of the mntfs type. So it's somewhat similar to /proc/mounts on Linux. It cannot be modified.
• /etc/mnttab is actually a directory! (a mount point has to be a directory..)
• /etc/mnttab can be unmounted, renamed, rmdir'd (when unmounted) and mounted anywhere else.
• both df and mount rely on /etc/mnttab, thus not functioning when it's absent

On HP-UX:

• /etc/mnttab, which is a regular file, is similar to /etc/mtab on Linux.

And on another, non-related subject: looks like Debian Lenny has got only 80 bugs to go (as of 19/01/09)! Go Lenny!