How does cygwin mount mapped network drives

How does cygwin mount mapped network drives

The mount table is set up somewhere in the bowels of cygwin.dll during cygwin startup.

Without looking at the source code I can't give a more precise answer.

You can unmount and then remount using mount with different options if you need to change the default options.

mount will display the current mount table (with the mount options used).

Note:

The mount program is used to map your drives and shares onto Cygwin's simulated POSIX directory tree, much like as is done by mount commands on typical UNIX systems. However, in contrast to mount points given in /etc/fstab, mount points created or changed with mount are not persistent. They disappear immediately after the last process of the current user exited.

Edit /etc/fstab or /etc/fstab.d/$USER to make permanent changes.

Further reading

• fstab for examples.

• mount for more information about mount.

• Special filenames for a list of filename that are read by Cygwin before the mount table has been established.

Two docs pages describe Cygwin's mount mechanic:

• https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using.html - The Cygwin Mount Table
• https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-specialnames.html - Special filenames

An important quotation:

The /etc/fstab file is used to map Win32 drives and network shares into Cygwin's internal POSIX directory tree.

The only two exceptions are the file system types cygdrive and usertemp. The cygdrive type is used to set the cygdrive prefix.