Is there a difference between using pmount and mount?

Question

Is there any difference between using pmount to mount a device (e.g., USB drive) and using mount with user in the 4th column of /etc/fstab?

Essentially, is the only purpose of pmount to allow the mounting of a device as user, either without an fstab entry or to a mount point not specified by fstab... or are there greater differences?

Thank You.

Solution

From http://pmount.alioth.debian.org/

pmount is a wrapper around the standard mount program which permits normal users to mount removable devices without a matching /etc/fstab entry.

So yes its only purpose is to allow normal users to mount removable drives.

Comments

[new123456]

I'm thinking pmount is distro-specific - running Zenwalk 6.4, I can find no mention of it in my man pages. I use the user argument, by the way.

[DQdlM]

@new123456 it might be. It didn't come standard on xubuntu, I had to install it as a package. I used to use it a lot but I to just set up fstab the way I want