FSTAB-DECODE(8) Linux System Administrator's Manual FSTAB-DECODE(8)
NAME
fstab-decode - run a command with fstab-encoded arguments
SYNOPSIS
fstab-decode COMMAND [ARGUMENT ...]
DESCRIPTION
fstab-decode decodes escapes (such as newline characters and other
whitespace) in the specified ARGUMENTs and uses them to run COMMAND.
The argument escaping uses the same rules as path escaping in
/etc/fstab, /etc/mtab and /proc/mtab.
In essence fstab-decode can be used anytime we want to pass multiple pa-
rameters to a command as a list of command line arguments. It turns
output like this:
/root
/mnt/remote-disk
/home
Into one long list of parameters, "/root /mnt/remote-disk /home". This
can be useful when trying to work with multiple filesystems at once.
For instance, we can use it to unmount multiple NFS shares. This pro-
gram also removes whitespace and other characters which might cause pro-
grams such as mount(8) or umount(8) to fail.
EXIT STATUS
fstab-decode exits with status 127 if COMMAND can't be run. Otherwise
it exits with the status returned by COMMAND.
EXAMPLES
The following example reads fstab, finds all instances of VFAT filesys-
tems and prints their mount points (argument 2 in the fstab file).
fstab-decode then runs the specified program, umount(8), and passes it
the list of VFAT mountpoints. This unmounts all VFAT partitions.
fstab-decode umount $(awk '$3 == "vfat" { print $2 }' /etc/fstab)
SEE ALSO
fstab(5)
sysvinit May 2006 FSTAB-DECODE(8)
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