Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 11:29:41 +0900 From: Rob <nospam@users.sourceforge.net> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: automounting cd-rom & cd-rw devices Message-ID: <40678A15.6050407@users.sourceforge.net> In-Reply-To: <20040328095920.GA33245@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophile.co.uk> References: <200403272013.40447.jaymo@cromagnon.cullmail.com> <200403281614.53868.malcolm.kay@internode.on.net> <4066871B.8010005@users.sourceforge.net> <20040328095920.GA33245@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophile.co.uk>
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Matthew Seaman wrote: > On Sun, Mar 28, 2004 at 05:04:43PM +0900, Rob wrote: >> >>What is this sysctl-black-magic about and where is more information? > > > You're right that finding which sysctl is required to achieve whatever > purpose can be tricky. Finding what sysctls exist is as easy as > typing 'sysctl -a', but working out what they actually do -- that's a > different story. sysctls are generally documented in man pages which > may or may not have a title related to the name of the sysctl. Plus > they are usually documented in the *programming* section of the > manual, rather than the user or system administration commands > sections, whose man pages come up by default if there's more than one > page under the same name. > > Let's take the vfs.usermount sysctl as an example. That is actually > documented in mount(2) -- the page describing the mount() (and > umount()) syscall, not mount(8) -- the program for mounting > partitions. If you type 'man mount' you'll get the mount(8) man page > by default. However if you type 'man 2 mount' you find this timeless > wisdom hidden within that page: > > By default only the super-user may call the mount() function. This > restriction can be removed by setting the sysctl vfs.usermount to a non- > zero value. > > How do I know where vfs.usermount is documented? Only by the rather > unsatisfactory means of grepping the whole collection of man pages: > > % cd /usr/share/man > % find . -name '*.gz' -print | xargs zgrep -l vfs.usermount > > (It would be really nice if the text produced by 'sysctl -d' gave you > a reference to the man page(s) where the sysctl was documented.) > > There is a project underway to create better documentation for sysctls Well, at a first glance I found the 'sysctl -ad' to be very incomplete. Although a few entries here do provide an explanation, too many do not and vfs.usermount is among them. Completing this table of explanations would be a good thing to do! Is this related to the project about sysctls docs? Regards, Rob.
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