GETMNTENT(3)

NAME
getmntent, setmntent, addmntent, endmntent, hasmntopt, getmntent_r - get file system descriptor file entry

SYNOPSIS
#include <stdio.h>
#include <mntent.h>

FILE *setmntent(const char *filename, const char *type);

struct mntent *getmntent(FILE *fp);

int addmntent(FILE *fp, const struct mntent *mnt);

int endmntent(FILE *fp);

char *hasmntopt(const struct mntent *mnt, const char *opt);

/* GNU extension */
#define _GNU_SOURCE    /* or _SVID_SOURCE or _BSD_SOURCE */
#include <mntent.h>

struct mntent *getmntent_r(FILE *fp, struct mntent *mntbuf,
                           char *buf, int buflen);

DESCRIPTION
These routines are used to access the file system description file /etc/fstab and the mounted file system description file /etc/mtab.

The setmntent() function opens the file system description file fp and returns a file pointer which can be used by getmntent(). The argument type is the type of access required and can take the same values as the mode argument of fopen(3).

The getmntent() function reads the next line from the file system description file fp and returns a pointer to a structure containing the broken out fields from a line in the file. The pointer points to a static area of memory which is overwritten by subsequent calls to getmntent().

The addmntent() function adds the mntent structure mnt to the end of the open file fp.

The endmntent() function closes the file system description file fp.

The hasmntopt() function scans the mnt_opts field (see below) of the mntent structure mnt for a substring that matches opt. See <mntent.h> and mount(8) for valid mount options.

The reentrant getmntent_r() function is similar to getmntent(), but stores the struct mount in the provided *mntbuf and stores the strings pointed to by the entries in that struct in the provided array buf of size buflen.

The mntent structure is defined in <mntent.h> as follows:

    struct mntent {
    	char 	*mnt_fsname;		/* name of mounted file system */
    	char	*mnt_dir;		/* file system path prefix */
    	char	*mnt_type;		/* mount type (see mntent.h) */
    	char	*mnt_opts;		/* mount options (see mntent.h) */
    	int	mnt_freq;		/* dump frequency in days */
    	int	mnt_passno;		/* pass number on parallel fsck */
    };
Since fields in the mtab and fstab files are separated by whitespace, octal escapes are used to represent the four characters space (\040), tab (\011), newline (\012) and backslash (\134) in those files when they occur in one of the four strings in a mntent structure. The routines addmntent() and getmntent() will convert from string representation to escaped representation and back.

RETURN VALUE
The getmntent() and getmntent_r() functions return a pointer to the mntent structure or NULL on failure.

The addmntent() function returns 0 on success and 1 on failure.

The endmntent() function always returns 1.

The hasmntopt() function returns the address of the substring if a match is found and NULL otherwise.

FILES
/etc/fstab          file system description file
/etc/mtab           mounted file system description file

CONFORMING TO
The non-reentrant functions are from SunOS 4.1.3. A routine getmntent_r() was introduced in HPUX 10, but it returns an int. The prototype shown above is glibc-only. LSB deprecates the functions endhostent(), sethostent() and setmntent().

NOTES
SysV also has a getmntent() function but the calling sequence differs, and the returned structure is different. Under SysV /etc/mnttab is used. BSD 4.4 and Digital Unix have a routine getmntinfo(), a wrapper around the system call getfsstat().

SEE ALSO
fopen(3), fstab(5), mount(8)