autofs(8)

Service control for the automounter

Section 8 autofs bookworm source

Summary

autofs is the service-control front end for the automount daemon, which mounts filesystems on demand and unmounts them when idle. You normally do not run it by hand at boot; instead you use it to start, stop, restart, reload, or check the status of the automounter after editing its maps. It reads mount definitions from /etc/auto.master and related map files.

Tip: After changing /etc/auto.master or adding/removing entries, run the reload action so autofs picks up the changes; edits to an existing indirect map take effect immediately without a reload.

Description

AUTOFS

NAME

autofs - Service control for the automounter

SYNOPSIS

If a SysV init script system is being used:
/etc/init.d/autofs start|stop|restart|reload|status

or if the systemd init system is being used:
systemctl start|stop|restart|reload|status autofs.service

DESCRIPTION

autofs controls the operation of the automount(8) daemon(s) running on the Linux system. Usually autofs is invoked at system boot time with the start parameter and at shutdown time with the stop parameter. Service control actions can also be manually invoked by the system administrator to shut down, restart, reload or obtain service status.

OPERATION

autofs will consult a configuration file /etc/auto.master (see auto.master(5)) by default to find mount points on the system. For each of those mount points automount(8) will mount and start a thread, with the appropriate parameters, to manage the mount point.

/etc/init.d/autofs reload or systemctl autofs.service reload will check the current auto.master map against the current automount managed mounts. It will terminate those daemons or threads (depending on autofs version) whose entries have been removed, re-read the automount maps for entries that have changed and start new daemons or threads for entries that have been added.

If an indirect map is modified then the change will become effective immediately. If an indirect map uses the browse option, the master map contains direct mount maps or the auto.master map is modified then the autofs service control reload action must be rerun to activate the changes.

However, if a map entry has offsets and is currently in use the offset mounts cannot be updated due to potential mount dependencies. In this case the map entry offsets will not be updated until after the map entry has expired.

/etc/init.d/autofs status or systemctl status autofs.service will display the status of, automount(8), running or not. When using the systemd init system the status output includes somewhat more information related to the service status.

systemctl(1) has more functions than the actions mentioned here, see systemctl(1) for more information.

SEE ALSO

automount(8), autofs(5), autofs.conf(5), auto.master(5), autofs_ldap_auth.conf(5), systemctl(1).

AUTHOR

This manual page was written by Christoph Lameter <chris@waterf.org>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system. Edited by H. Peter Anvin <hpa@transmeta.com> and Ian Kent <raven@themaw.net>.

Examples

systemctl start autofs.service

Start the automounter service (on a systemd system).

systemctl reload autofs.service

Re-read the maps after editing /etc/auto.master so added or removed mount points take effect.

systemctl status autofs.service

Check whether the automount daemon is running and view its current status.

/etc/init.d/autofs restart

Restart the automounter on a SysV-init system.

See Also