A tool for automatically mounting and unmounting filesystems
Description
The goal of autofs is to provide on-demand mounting and race free automatic unmounting
of various other filesystems. This provides two key advantages:
1.There is no need to delay boot until all filesystems that might be needed are mounted.
Processes that try to access those slow filesystems might be delayed but other processes
can continue freely. This is particularly important for network filesystems (e.g. NFS)
or filesystems stored on media with a media-changing robot.
2.The names and locations of filesystems can be stored in a remote database and can change
at any time. The content in that data base at the time of access will be used to provide
a target for the access. The interpretation of names in the filesystem can even be
programmatic rather than database-backed, allowing wildcards for example, and can vary
based on the user who first accessed a name.
