Can I find out the auto-mount options?

Question

If I edit mount options, I can untick "Automatic Mount Options" and define my own. However, I would like to use those options it would normally use as automatic ones, just with one change (mount on stratup). How do I find out what the auto-options would be?

Answer 1

Actually distributions are auto-mounting devices through the window manager, or some element of the window manager.

For example for Gnome, nautilus is the program managing this behavior. For this case you can open Nautilus and go to edit/preferences/media.

In other words its normally depends on your graphical interface, but some rarely systems use text mode services to do this.

If you want to mount at the startup, you have two options, by editing fstab or by adding a command on /etc/rc.local.

Answer 2

You can find the options on a mounted filesystem from the information provided by the kernel through the proc filesystem, specifically in /proc/mounts.

grep /media/something /proc/mounts

You can use the findmnt command to print this information in a nicer format.

Some options are not listed if they are the default, i.e. if they're the setting that a plain mount would apply. That's not an issue if you want to issue a command line equivalent to what your GUI is doing, or to generate an equivalent fstab entry, but it's something to keep in mind if you want to perform a similar mount on a system with a different kernel version or a different version of mount. Even that is mostly not an issue because the default settings rarely change, but for the few settings whose defaults have changed over time, such as atime-related settings or ACL activation, you may have to dig through the documentation or the source code (or a few threads on this site) to find out what the absence of an option means on your system.