What's the difference between mountall and mount -a? (Ubuntu, perhaps others)

Question

The mountall man page says "this is a temporary tool until init(8) itself" can do it, basically. Why not just use mount -a? Is there a difference between the two, and if so, which should I use for what?

Solution

According to the man page, the ubuntu version of mountall does the following :

• reads fstab(5)
• calls fsck(8)
• calls mount(8)
• and calls swapon(8)

Canonical does not provide much information on the reason why they had to build a "temporary tool".

According to mount manual, mount -a "[...] causes all filesystems mentioned in fstab to be mounted[...]".

Anyway, I advise you to use mount -a as it works on most unices.

Comments

[William Nyqvister]

Seems you are saying you don't see the difference either, right?

[zukijuki]

Not at all. For example, I can't see where mount -a would launch fsck (just quickly checked source code and man page) and mountall is described as temporary.