Take the 2-minute tour ×

I'm mounting several drives in a script. Each one is sometimes unavailable, because the PC it's on is turned off, for instance. However, mount_smbfs takes a long time to fail (around 75 seconds), even with the "-o soft" option. Is there a way to speed this up?

Thinking about it, I guess a workaround would be to first ping the machine, and only attempt the mount if that succeeds. Is there an even better way?

share|improve this question
add comment

1 Answer

up vote 0 down vote accepted

This works as a workaround:

ping -q -c 1 -t 2 ${HOST} > /dev/null;
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
   echo "${HOST} is down."
   mount_smbfs ...

Where -t 2 is a 2 second timeout.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Your Answer


