computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, hardware and softw ...

the Berkeley Automounter (or amd) is a computer

automounter An automounter is any program or software facility which automatically mount (computing), mounts filesystems in response to access operations by user programs. An automounter system utility (Daemon (computer software), daemon under Unix), when not ...

daemon A demon is a malevolent supernatural being, evil spirit or fiend in religion, occultism, literature, fiction, mythology and folklore. Demon, daemon or dæmon may also refer to: Entertainment Fictional entities * Daemon (G.I. Joe), a character ...

which first appeared in

4.4BSD The history of the Berkeley Software Distribution began in the 1970s when University of California, Berkeley received a copy of Research Unix, Unix. Professors and students at the university began adding software to the operating system and releas ...

in 1994. The original Berkeley automounter was created by Jan-Simon Pendry in 1989 and was donated to Berkeley. After languishing for a few years, the maintenance was picked up by Erez Zadok, who has maintained it since 1993. The am-utils package which comprises and is included with

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

NetBSD NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was fork (software development), forked. It continues to ...

, and

OpenBSD OpenBSD is a security-focused operating system, security-focused, free software, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by fork (software development), forking NetBSD ...

. It is also included with a vast number of

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

distributions, including

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial Linux distribution developed by Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop version for x86-64. Fedora Linux and ...

Fedora Core Fedora Linux is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. It was originally developed in 2003 as a continuation of the Red Hat Linux project. It contains software distributed under various free and open-source licenses and aims to be ...

, ASPLinux, Trustix,

Mandriva Mandriva S.A. was a Public company, public software company specializing in Linux and open-source software. Its corporate headquarters was in Paris, and it had development centers in Metz, France and Curitiba, Brazil. Mandriva, S.A. was the deve ...

, and others. The Berkeley automounter has a large number of contributors, including several who worked on the original automounter with Jan-Simon Pendry. It is one of the oldest and more portable automounters available today, as well as the most flexible and the most widely used.

Caveats

There are a few "side effects" that come with files that are mounted using automounter, these may differ depending on how the service was configured. * Access time of automounted directories is initially set to the time automounter was used to mount them, however after the directories are accessed, this statistic changes. * On some systems, directories are not visible until the first time they are used. This means commands such as ''ls'' will fail. * If mounted directories are not used for a period of time, directories are unmounted. * When automounter mounts directories, they are said to be owned by ''root'' until someone uses them, at that time the correct owner of the directory shows up.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Am-utils Home Page
(home of amd)
RPMs
fro
rpmfind.net
Unix network-related software