Accessing a shadowed mount point

Question

A mount point /mnt/sub is shadowed by another mount point /mnt. Is it always possible to access the mounted filesystem?

Root access is a given. The system is a reasonably recent Linux.

Example scenario: accessing the branches of an overlay root

The basic sequence of operations is:

mount device1 /mnt/sub
mount device2 /mnt

After this /mnt/sub is a file on device2 (if it exists). The question is how to access files on device1.

Some devices can be mounted twice, so mount device1 /elsewhere would work. But this doesn't work for all devices, in particular not for FUSE filesystems.

This differs from the already covered case where a subdirectory is shadowed by a mount point, but the mount point of the subdirectory is itself visible, and a bind mount can create an unobscured view. In the example above, mount --bind / /elsewhere lets us see the /mnt/sub directory from the root filesystem on /elsewhere/mnt/sub, but this question is about accessing the filesystem on device1.

Answer 1

# unshare --mount  # this opens a sub-shell
# cd /
# umount /mnt

do what thou wilt

# exit  # close the sub-shell

Answer 2

This probably comes too late, but the way I normally do this is:

• mount the original device again on a different directory
• the new directory now only contains the original device's folders, and not any submounts.
• this does not depend on mount order, kernel namespace support, etc!
• does not require you to touch / move the current mount (which may be used by your services)

---

Here's how this would work for your root device, for example:

mount /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv /mnt
cd /mnt
# this folder only contains files from the root device

In your example:

# your actual (untouched) work dirs
mount device1 /mnt/sub
mount device2 /mnt

# access /mnt/sub contents in another dir by remounting it there
mount device1 /mnt/tmp
cd /mnt/tmp
# any operations here apply solely to device1

Answer 3

The files living on device1 under /mnt/sub are not accessible through that path at all. Remount the device elsewhere, or make sure that the two devices are mounted in the opposite order.