Here is a quick tip for anyone who needs to access files that exists underneath an already mounted filesystem mount point. Â For example suppose that you have some files located in a directory called ‘/tmp/docs’.
At some point someone might decide to accidentally take that same directory, and create an NFS or CIFS mount, if you need to access the original files that existed before the new mount point was put into place, you have two options.
- Unmount the NFS or CIFS filesystem and access your files and then remount.
- However, you may find yourself in a situation (such as I did), where it is extremely inconvenient or impossible for you have the downtime associated with the umount/remount process. In that case you have another option…you can use a ‘bind’ mount.
All you need to do is something like the following:
mount --bind /tmp /tmp/new_location
Now you should be able to access the original files here:
‘/tmp/new_location/docs’