Rapid location of mount points
Jonathan M. Smith · Software Practice and Experience · 1989
Abstract ‘Mount points’ allow more storage to be grafted into tree‐structured hierarchical file systems. Administrative tasks use their locations, which are tabulated in a file. In our System V Unix environment, this file was occasionally removed. Getmnt was written to recover the information. Getmnt has had three significant versions. The original version (getmnt1) was a highly optimized naive tree traversal. Getmnt3 improved the real time performance by a mean factor of 7 by pruning unnecessary branches from the traversal. Getmnt3 doubled getmnt2's speed, with a change from depth‐first to breadth‐first search. On our development system, getmnt1 required 647.6 s to run, whereas getmnt3 required 42.53 s.