Why is "sudo unmount" required for unmounting an sshfs-mount if it was mounted without sudo privilges?

16

3

I have an sshfs FUSE filesystem mounted in ~/mountpoint. I tried umount mountpoint and diskutil unmount mountpoint (on a Mac here) and both failed. I used sshfs -o IdentityFile=<key> user@hostname:/home/<user> ~/mountpoint; none of that required sudo.

Why, then, do unmount it do I need sudo privilges?

kalaracey

Posted 2012-05-13T07:09:27.313

Reputation: 2 039

Answers

17

Because umount only allows root to unmount regular filesystems.

You can, however, unmount any FUSE filesystem (inclusing sshfs) without using sudo:

fusermount -u mountpoint

hedgie

Posted 2012-05-13T07:09:27.313

Reputation: 486

1yes, but I have no command fusermount installed; I believe it is linux-specific. But thanks - I didn't know umount was sudo-only – kalaracey – 2012-05-13T07:52:24.793

Asked: 2012-05-13T07:09:27.313

Viewed: 12 457 times

Active: 2012-05-13T08:05:10.797