pmount - Online in the Cloud

PROGRAM:

NAME

pmount - mount arbitrary hotpluggable devices as normal user

SYNOPSIS

pmount [ options ] device

pmount [ options ] device label

pmount --lock [ options ] device pid

pmount --unlock [ options ] device pid

pmount

DESCRIPTION

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

pmount also supports encrypted devices which use dm-crypt and have LUKS metadata. If a
LUKS-capable cryptsetup is installed, pmount will use it to decrypt the device first and
mount the mapped unencrypted device instead.

pmount is invoked like this:

pmount device [ label ]

This will mount device to a directory below /media if policy is met (see below). If label
is given, the mount point will be /media/label, otherwise it will be /media/device.

The device will be mounted with the following flags:
async,atime,nodev,noexec,noauto,nosuid,user,rw

Some applications like CD burners modify a raw device which must not be mounted while the
burning process is in progress. To prevent automatic mounting, pmount offers a locking
mechanism: pmount --lock device pid will prevent the pmounting of device until it is
unlocked again using pmount --unlock device pid. The process id pid assigns the lock to a
particular process; this allows to lock a device by several processes.

During mount, the list of locks is cleaned, i. e. all locks whose associated process does
not exist any more are removed. This prevents forgotten indefinite locks from crashed
programs.

Running pmount without arguments prints the list of mounted removable devices, a bit in
the fashion of mount (1).

Please note that you can use labels and uuids as described in fstab (5) for devices
present in /etc/fstab. In this case, the device name need to match exactly the
corresponding entry in /etc/fstab, including the LABEL= or UUID= part.

Important note for Debian: The permission to execute pmount is restricted to members of
the system group plugdev. Please add all desktop users who shall be able to use pmount to
this group by executing

adduser user plugdev

(as root).

POLICY

The mount will succeed if all of the following conditions are met:

· device is a block device in /dev/

· device is not in /etc/fstab (if it is, pmount executes mount device as the calling user
to handle this transparently). See below for more details.

· device is not already mounted according to /etc/mtab and /proc/mounts

· if the mount point already exists, there is no device already mounted at it and the
directory is empty

· device is removable (USB, FireWire, or MMC device, or /sys/block/drive/removable is 1)
or whitelisted in /etc/pmount.allow.

· device is not locked

OPTIONS

-r, --read-only
Force the device to be mounted read only. If neither -r nor -w is specified, the
kernel will choose an appropriate default.

-w, --read-write
Force the device to be mounted read/write. If neither -r nor -w is specified, the
kernel will choose an appropriate default.

-s, --sync
Mount the device with the sync option, i. e. without write caching. Default is
async (write-back). With this option, write operations are much slower and due to
the massive increase of updates of inode/FAT structures, flash devices may suffer
heavily if you write large files. This option is intended to make it safe to just
rip out USB drives without proper unmounting.

-A, --noatime
Mount the device with the noatime option. Default is atime.

-e, --exec
Mount the device with the exec option. Default is noexec.

-t filesystem, --type filesystem
Mount as specified file system type. The file system type is automatically
determined if this option is not given. See at the bottom for a list of currently
supported filesystems.

-c charset, --charset charset
Use given I/O character set (default: utf8 if called in an UTF-8 locale, otherwise
mount default). This corresponds with the mount option iocharset (or nls for NTFS).
This option is ignored for file systems that do not support setting the character
set (see mount (8) for details). Important note: pmount will now mount VFAT
filesystems with iocharset=iso8859-1 as iocharset=utf8 currently makes the
filesystem case-sensitive (which is pretty bad...).

-u umask, --umask umask
Use specified umask instead of the default one. For UDF, the default is '000', for
VFAT and NTFS the default is '077'. This value is ignored for file systems which do
not support setting an umask. Note that you can use a value of 077 to forbid anyone
else to read/write the files, 027 to allow your group to read the files and 022 to
allow anyone to read the files (but only you can write).

--dmask dmask

--fmask fmask
Some filesystems (essentially VFAT and HFS) supports separate umasks (see the -u
option just above) for directories and files, to avoid the annoying effect of
having all files executable. For these filesystems, you can specify separately the
masks using these options. By default, fmask is umask without all executable
permissions and dmask is umask. Most of the times, these settings should just do
what you want, so there should be seldom any need for using directly the --fmask
and --dmask options.

-p file --passphrase file
If the device is encrypted (dm-crypt with LUKS metadata), read the passphrase from
specified file instead of prompting at the terminal.

-h, --help
Print a help message and exit successfully.

-d, --debug
Enable verbose debug messages.

-V, --version
Print the current version number and exit successfully.

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