What happens if you mount to a non-empty mount point with fuse

Question

I am new to fuse  When I try to run a FUSE client program I get this error   fuse  mountpoint is not empty fuse  if you are sure this is safe  use the  nonempty  mount option   I understand that a mountpoint is the directory where you will logically attach the FUSE filesystem  What will happen if I mount to this location  What are the dangers  Is it just that the directory will be overwritten  Basically  what will happen if you mount to a non empty directory

User · Answer

For me the error message goes away if I unmount the old mount before mounting it again:

fusermount -u /mnt/point

If it's not already mounted you get a non-critical error:

$ fusermount -u /mnt/point

fusermount: entry for /mnt/point not found in /etc/mtab

So in my script I just put unmount it before mounting it.

User · Answer

Just add -o nonempty in command line  like this   s3fs -o nonempty   lt bucket-name gt   lt  mount point  gt

User · Answer

Apparently nothing happens  it fails in a non-destructive way and gives you a warning  I ve had this happen as well very recently  One way you can solve this is by moving all the files in the non-empty mount point to somewhere else  e g    mv  nonEmptyMountPoint     Desktop mountPointDump    This way your mount point is now empty  and your mount command will work

User · Answer

force it with -l      sudo umount -l   HOME  mount dir

User · Answer

You need to make sure that the files on the device mounted by fuse will not have the same paths and file names as files which already existing in the nonempty mountpoint  Otherwise this would lead to confusion  If you are sure  pass -o nonempty to the mount command   You can try what is happening using the following commands    Linux rocks       without destroying anything       create 10 MB file  dd if  dev zero of partition bs 1024 count 10240     create loopdevice from that file sudo losetup  dev loop0   partition     create  filesystem on it sudo e2mkfs ext3  dev loop0     mount the partition to temporary folder and create a file mkdir test sudo mount -o loop  dev loop0 test echo  bar    sudo tee test foo    unmount the device sudo umount  dev loop0    create the file again echo  bar2   gt  test foo    now mount the device  having file with same name on it     and see what happens sudo mount -o loop  dev loop0 test

[linux] What happens if you mount to a non-empty mount point with fuse?

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