FreeBSD® Unleashed

Monitoring Filesystem Usage

One concept with UNIX-style operating systems that is quite foreign to Windows users is the idea of mount points. In Windows/DOS, each disk in your system is assigned a drive letter (such as C:), and each drive has its own independent filesystem. For example, a machine with two hard drives and a CD-ROM drive has C:, D:, and E: drives that the user can switch between. In UNIX, the concept is a bit different. There is only one system-wide directory structure, and all disks in the system are mounted at different points in the structure. An appropriate analogy would be that a Windows system resembles a vineyard, with a row of similar trees or vines; whereas a UNIX system is more like a single large tree with smaller trees ...