# /media

Amid much controversy and consternation on the part of system and network administrators a directory containing mount points for removable media has now been created. Funnily enough, it has been named /media.

    This directory contains subdirectories which are used as mount points for
    removeable media such as floppy disks, cdroms and zip disks.

    The motivation for the creation of this directory has been that historically
    there have been a number of other different places used to mount removeable
    media such as /cdrom, /mnt or /mnt/cdrom. Placing the mount points for all
    removeable media directly in the root directory would potentially result in
    a large number of extra directories in /. Although the use of subdirectories
    in /mnt as a mount point has recently been common, it conflicts with a much
    older tradition of using /mnt directly as a temporary mount point.

    The following directories, or symbolic links to directories, must be in /media,
    if the corresponding subsystem is installed:

    floppy     Floppy drive (optional)
    cdrom      CD-ROM drive (optional)
    cdrecorder CD writer (optional)
    zip        Zip drive (optional)

    On systems where more than one device exists for mounting a certain type of
    media, mount directories can be created by appending a digit to the name of
    those available above starting with '0', but the unqualified name must also
    exist.

    A compliant implementation with two CDROM drives might have /media/cdrom0
    and /media/cdrom1 with /media/cdrom a symlink to either of these.

Please see the section on the /mnt directory to achieve a better understanding of the process on mounting and unmounting filesystems.