What's the best way to check if a volume is mounted in a Bash script?

Solution 1:

Avoid using /etc/mtab because it may be inconsistent.

Avoid piping mount because it needn't be that complicated.

Simply:

if grep -qs '/mnt/foo ' /proc/mounts; then
    echo "It's mounted."
else
    echo "It's not mounted."
fi

(The space after the /mnt/foo is to avoid matching e.g. /mnt/foo-bar.)

Solution 2:

if mountpoint -q /mnt/foo 
then
   echo "mounted"
else
   echo "not mounted"
fi

or

mountpoint -q /mnt/foo && echo "mounted" || echo "not mounted"

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Solution 3:

findmnt -rno SOURCE,TARGET "$1" avoids all the problems in the other answers. It cleanly does the job with just one command.

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Other approaches have these downsides:

• grep -q and grep -s are an extra unnecessary step and aren't supported everywhere.
• /proc/\* isn't supported everywhere. (mountpoint is also based on proc).
• mountinfo is based on /proc/..
• cut -f3 -d' ' messes up spaces in path names
• Parsing mount's white space is problematic. It's man page now says:

.. listing mode is maintained for backward compatibility only.

For more robust and customizable output use findmnt(8), especially in your scripts.

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Bash functions:

#These functions return exit codes: 0 = found, 1 = not found

isMounted    () { findmnt -rno SOURCE,TARGET "$1" >/dev/null;} #path or device
isDevMounted () { findmnt -rno SOURCE        "$1" >/dev/null;} #device only
isPathMounted() { findmnt -rno        TARGET "$1" >/dev/null;} #path   only

#where: -r = --raw, -n = --noheadings, -o = --output

Usage examples:

if isPathMounted "/mnt/foo bar";      #Spaces in path names are ok.
   then echo "path is mounted"
   else echo "path is not mounted"
fi

if isDevMounted "/dev/sdb4"; 
   then echo "device is mounted"
   else echo "device is not mounted"
fi

#Universal:
if isMounted "/mnt/foo bar"; 
   then echo "device is mounted"
   else echo "device is not mounted"
fi

if isMounted "/dev/sdb4";
   then echo "device is mounted"
   else echo "device is not mounted"
fi

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Solution 4:

A script like this isn't ever going to be portable. A dirty secret in unix is that only the kernel knows what filesystems are where, and short of things like /proc (not portable) it'll never give you a straight answer.

I typically use df to discover what the mount-point of a subdirectory is, and what filesystem it is in.

For instance (requires posix shell like ash / AT&T ksh / bash / etc)

case $(df  $mount)
in
  $(df  /)) echo $mount is not mounted ;;
  *) echo $mount has a non-root filesystem mounted on it ;;
esac

Kinda tells you useful information.

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Solution 5:

the following is what i use in one of my rsync backup cron-jobs. it checks to see if /backup is mounted, and tries to mount it if it isn't (it may fail because the drive is in a hot-swap bay and may not even be present in the system)

NOTE: the following only works on linux, because it greps /proc/mounts - a more portable version would run 'mount | grep /backup', as in Matthew's answer..

  if ! grep -q /backup /proc/mounts ; then
    if ! mount /backup ; then
      echo "failed"
      exit 1
    fi
  fi
  echo "suceeded."
  # do stuff here