I need to mount a directory from my laptop on my desktop machine using sshfs. At first I was not making the mount terribly regularly, so I did it manually each time that I needed it. However, the frequency increased over time and I was eventually mounting it every day (or multiple times during the course of a day!). This was a perfect opportunity to employ some automation.
The obvious tool for the job was the crontab. I wrote an entry which triggered every minute. It checked whether the directory was already mounted and, if not, executed the mount.
df | grep remote || sshfs username@laptop:/home/username ~/remote/
The details of this command are straight forward: first run df and check whether the directory is already mounted. If it is, then no further action is required. If not, then mount the remote directory /home/username on laptop at /home/remote on my desktop.
This worked pretty well as long as laptop was available on the network. However, if it wasn’t then the command would fail repeatedly and I got a dialog popping up on my desktop every minute. This got rather annoying and more sophisticated logic was obviously in order!
My revised (and final solution) includes a check to see whether laptop is available on the network. If it is and the directory has not already been mounted, then the command proceeds to execute the sshfs mount.
(df | grep remote || ping -c1 laptop) && sshfs username@laptop:/home/username ~/remote/