Weird message in syslog

[Steve Ferrara]

Can anyone tell me what this message means? There was only one occurence of it in the syslog. Thanks

"automount[2428]: fork a child process to delete an entry from /etc/mnttab"

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

It's just automounter going about its business. An inactive NFS mount needed to be unmounted so automount forks a child process to clean up the entry in /etc/mnttab.


Pete

[Alex Glennie]

The automount message happens when the mnttab is busy and automount needs to update it. Normally the automount process does this
directly. If the mnttab is locked by another process, however, it cannot do it
right away, so, instead of waiting around for the mnttab to become available, it
forks a copy of itself to do the update as soon as the mnttab becomes available.
In this manner the main process can continue to do other work. That's it. The
message is purely informational."

[Steve Ferrara]

Thanks guys!