How to Add Drive/Partition/Device Mount-Point Paths with Spaces to FSTAB

Ubuntu is pretty awesome when it comes to automounting your drives and USB devices; in my experience, it is miles ahead of Windows, and it keeps getting better with each release. But for a greater level of control, you can’t beat the old-fashioned way: mounting your drives via fstab at boot.

While Ubuntu now mounts drives and partitions in folders with names based on the labels, which includes spaces in the names, fstab is a tad more touchy when it comes to this. If you try mounting a drive in fstab to a mount-point with a path name like /media/Windows XP, the mounting will fail because of the space. Usual methods to get around this, like close the path off with / (ie: /media/Windows XP/) or put it in quotes (ie: ‘/media/Windows XP’ or “/media/Windows XP”), will fail – but there is a solution other than replacing spaces with hypens or underscores.

Simply replace any spaces with \040, so your line in fstab should look something like:

UUID=1D666EVIL6661D /media/Windows\040XP

The drive will mount in the appropriate folder from then onwards (ie: /media/Windows XP), and there’s no need to reboot if you’re urgently trying to access a drive – simply open a terminal and run sudo mount -a to mount all devices in fstab.

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Just in case you are unfamiliar with fstab, the way you edit it is sudo gedit /etc/fstab. However, if you needed that bit of info, chances are you really shouldn’t be doing so, unless you’ve first read a little of the abundant info available out there on the subject of fstab and mounting drives in Ubuntu (and other Linux distros). The last thing you would want to do is render your system unbootable because you made an error in editing fstab. While this guide is just for how to deal with spaces in paths, still exercise caution if this is all new to you.

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