Guy Harris graciously sent me a note sharing his thoughts on the finer points of autofs. I think his notes deserve to be shared with all. Thank you Guy.
~snip
automount_reread
~snip
It’s not a placeholder for a future command – it’s left over from an idea that was abandoned because it wasn’t the right idea. To manually re-read the automounter maps, you just run the automount command as root.Also, automount doesn’t run automountd; it just mounts or unmounts autofs.(It does signal automountd, if it’s running, to tell it to flush any cached information it has, but that’s a different matter.)
In addition, -static happens to be a direct map, but in
/–static
it’s the “/-” that indicates that the map is direct – the Solaris automounter doesn’t support “-fstab” or “-static” (those are in the OS X automounter for backwards compatibility with the old OS X automounter), but it does support direct maps.
Concur on all points. Further extends what I have said in the past about Apple documentation being a bit rough on the edges. For e.g. the automount <->automountd description is right off of their man pages.
