/etc/auto.master - Master Map for automounter

The auto.master map is consulted when the autofs(8) script is invoked to set up the necessary mount points for the automounter. Each line in this file describes a mount point and points to another file describing the file systems to be mounted under this mountpoint. The access to those maps is governed by a key.

For indirect automount maps access to an automounted file system is customarily done using the path scheme:

/mountpoint/key/path/file,

where the mountpoint will be listed in the auto.master configuration file. The key is matched in the map file pointed to by the master map (See autofs(5)). The path and the file are referring to the file on the file system mounted. For direct automount maps access is via the full path to the filesystem as given in the associated map. The mountpoint for the direct map is always specified as /- in the auto.master map.

The file has three fields separated by an arbitrary number of blanks or tabs. Lines beginning with # are comments. The first field is the mount point. Second field is the map file to be consulted for this mount-point. This field is of the form maptype:mapname, where maptype is one of the supported map types (file, program, yp, nisplus, hesiod, userdir, ldap), and mapname is the name of the map. The third field is optional and can contain options to+ be applied to all entries in the map. Options are cumulative, which is a difference from the behavior of the SunOS automounter.

The format of the map file and the options are described in autofs(5).

/home	/etc/auto.home
/misc	/etc/auto.misc
/mnt	yp:mnt.map

This will generate three mountpoints /home, /misc, and /mnt. All accesses to /home will lead to the consultation of the map in /etc/auto.home, all accesses to /misc will consult the map in /etc/auto.misc, and all accesses to /mnt will consult the NIS map mnt.map.

automount(8), autofs(5), autofs(8).

This manual page was written by Christoph Lameter <chris@waterf.org>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system. Edited by <hpa@transmeta.com>.