The proper way to read records from fstab is to use the routines getmntent(3). I can attest that it's the *only* bullet proof way of doing it. And getmntent isn't available in many userland programs other than the mount/umount/fsck interfaces. You may think that you can find a way using awk, sed or grep, but I can point you to many Gentoo bugs which will demonstrate otherwise. Thanks Roy