Amid much controversy and consternation on the part of system and network administrators a directory containing mount points for removable media has now been created. Funnily enough, it has been named /media.
This directory contains subdirectories which are used as mount points for removeable media such as floppy disks, cdroms and zip disks. The motivation for the creation of this directory has been that historically there have been a number of other different places used to mount removeable media such as /cdrom, /mnt or /mnt/cdrom. Placing the mount points for all removeable media directly in the root directory would potentially result in a large number of extra directories in /. Although the use of subdirectories in /mnt as a mount point has recently been common, it conflicts with a much older tradition of using /mnt directly as a temporary mount point. The following directories, or symbolic links to directories, must be in /media, if the corresponding subsystem is installed: floppy Floppy drive (optional) cdrom CD-ROM drive (optional) cdrecorder CD writer (optional) zip Zip drive (optional) On systems where more than one device exists for mounting a certain type of media, mount directories can be created by appending a digit to the name of those available above starting with '0', but the unqualified name must also exist. A compliant implementation with two CDROM drives might have /media/cdrom0 and /media/cdrom1 with /media/cdrom a symlink to either of these. |
Please see the section on the /mnt directory to achieve a better understanding of the process on mounting and unmounting filesystems.