FSTAB-DECODE(8)

✨ NAME ✨

okay bestie, this is fstab-decode from the Linux System Administrator's Manual 💅 It's a section 8 page, and the whole thing is about running a command with fstab-encoded arguments 🧚

fstab-decode - run a command with fstab-encoded arguments

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

fstab-decode COMMAND [ARGUMENT ...]

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay so fstab-decode decodes escapes (like newline characters and other whitespace) in the ARGUMENTs you give it, then uses them to run COMMAND 🫶 The escaping uses the exact same rules as path escaping in /etc/fstab, /etc/mtab and /proc/mtab, so it's all one big happy family 🌸

In essence, you can use fstab-decode any time you want to pass a bunch of parameters to a command as a list of command line arguments. It takes output that looks like this:

/root
/mnt/remote-disk
/home

and turns it into one long list of parameters, "/root /mnt/remote-disk /home" ✨ Super useful when you're dealing with multiple filesystems at once. For example, you can use it to unmount a whole pile of NFS shares in one go 🦋

This program also strips out whitespace and other sneaky characters that could make programs like mount(8) or umount(8) fail. Major clean-up energy 🧼✨

👑 EXIT STATUS 👑

fstab-decode exits with status 127 if COMMAND can't be run 💀 Otherwise, it exits with whatever status COMMAND returned. So it's basically just passing the baton 🏃‍♀️💨

🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

ok this one is iconic 😭 The example reads fstab, finds every VFAT filesystem, and prints their mount points (that's argument 2 in the fstab file). Then fstab-decode runs the program you specify, umount(8), and hands it the list of VFAT mountpoints. Result: every VFAT partition gets unmounted 🔥

fstab-decode umount $(awk '$3 == "vfat" { print $2 }' /etc/fstab)

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

fstab(5) 🍓

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bestie that's the whole page 💜 It's from sysvinit, dated May 2006, so it's a little vintage but the vibes are still immaculate 💅✨