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Timeline for What is /etc/mtab in Linux?

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Jan 28, 2021 at 6:03 comment added Jarl This is a very high quality answer.Thank you!
Apr 25, 2019 at 5:11 comment added grawity Linux /proc/self/{mounts,mountinfo} are also pollable, allowing programs to watch for changes. (Though it doesn't actually tell you what the changes are; you have to re-read the whole table.)
Apr 24, 2019 at 8:37 comment added user313992 @gerrit it's a regular file which has size 0 but still contains data ;-)
Apr 24, 2019 at 7:48 history edited JdeBP CC BY-SA 4.0
Have some more further reading.
Apr 24, 2019 at 7:16 comment added gerrit I know pseudo files and regular files, but what is a pseudo regular file?
Apr 24, 2019 at 3:08 comment added user313992 though admittedly, fstab(5) only tells about spaces being replaced by octal escapes, while it's spaces, tabs, newlines and backslashes
Apr 24, 2019 at 2:35 comment added user313992 not only /proc/mounts, but /proc/self/mounts is itself a compatibility mechanism now; it's only showing a subset of the info available in /proc/self/mountinfo. The format of /proc/self/mounts is documented in proc(5) as identical to fstab(5)
Apr 23, 2019 at 19:20 comment added Weijun Zhou In complement with my comment in the question here is the mtab(5) from the old days: man.cat-v.org/unix_8th/5/mtab.
Apr 23, 2019 at 19:16 history answered JdeBP CC BY-SA 4.0