Other Whence ext2/3/4?

Q

QuesoGrande

I have searched the handbook and forums as well as plain old Google search and find a lot of postings and text talking all around this question ... but I seem to be missing any that take it head-on. So I ask here ...

I have a usb stick formatted for ext3 and intended for use as a sneakernet ( Remember that??? ) medium between a FreeBSD host and a small cluster of Linux ( Sigh! ) machines. It works Just Fine. Except for one thing ... as often as not I forget to tell the mount command what the target FS is. A different stick formatted for msdosfs recognizes the file system Just Fine, but is not what I want to use. Am I missing something obvious or is ext2/3 not automatically recognizable to mount commands?

Thanks for any insights ...

QG
 
FreeBSD doesn't have filesystem autodetection in the mount command.

You could hack up a script around the file(1) utility.
 
Ah, so, @cracauer and I have considered a script. But Now I am confused ... When I mount my msdosfs sticks and forget the fstype, it works just fine. If there is no autodetect, then what is doing this for me? Not an argument against what you say, but my attempt to understand the goings on.
 
QuesoGrande said:
Ah, so, @cracauer and I have considered a script. But Now I am confused ... When I mount my msdosfs sticks and forget the fstype, it works just fine. If there is no autodetect, then what is doing this for me? Not an argument against what you say, but my attempt to understand the goings on.
Click to expand...

How do you mount it? On the commandline or via some GUI tool?
 
When I make the error it is almost always from the command line. I have only had trouble with one application, and that was of my own writing, so fixing it was straightforward. I do appreciate that applications and scripts tend to prevent these OOPS kinds of problems. ;) I am basically a CLI kind of guy and try to stay away from GUI windows when I can.
 
I think the reason you were asked about a GUI tool is that mounting an msdosfs device from the command line doesn't work without telling mount what it is. Perhaps mount is picking-up on an fstab entry.
 
AHA! I found a partially deleted entry in fstab. Surprised it didn't just choke everything, but fully removing it now seems to have everything running as expected. And in this business, expected = satisfied. Thanks for the nudge in the right direction,bob2112.

QG
 
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