I am trying to make my Centos linux to automount a ntfs partition and I want to mount point to be made of two words, such as:
/media/two\ words
The problem is that when I edit fstab with vim, the rest of the text (ntfs-3g rw etc.) is highlighted in red automatically and, of course, the partition isn't mounted automatically. Is there any way I can escape this other than with a simple backslash?

Thanks

I'm not sure but you could try to put the complete path between quotesMarkus

Have you tried it with "/media/two words" instead.
I can't really see why you would do something like that, it is inconvenient and leads to a lot of potential error cases.
And IMHO it is just bad style on a Linux/Unix machine.

You should be able to use "\nnn" octal escapes for problem characters. Those escapes are used in /etc/fstab, /etc/mtab, and /proc/mounts, which is why there is a wrapper fstab-decode to facilitate running programs that need fields from those files as arguments.

1 members found this post helpful.

It's not that I really want to do it - of course I can choose a single-worded mount point - I want to understand how linux interprets this and why seemingly it doesn't allow for two or more words.

I've tried using quotes, but vim highlights the rest of the sentence in red (beginning with rw,umask etc.). So that doesn't seem the right syntax.

Any other suggestions? Can't this be done? If it can't, I won't insist, obviously

I think I had ignored your comment undeservedly So 040 octal code represents space, you're saying?

Ok, I'll try that and get right back to you.

Later edit:
Well, that really worked Thanks indeed, that was a really good idea!

The initial reason for editing this was that I had chosen the dropbox folder in a ntfs partition, which had a mounting point made of up two words (that was the name of the partition given in Windows). The problem was that every time I needed to mount it in gnome (centos) manually - the pattern was already given, I went to places, etc. - and dropbox gave an error, it didn't find the respective folder. And I wanted to have the partition mounted before dropbox started without changing the mountpoint. Of couse I could have reconfigured dropbox, but that was the whole idea. To solve the problem without "disturbing" dropbox.

Thanks, it's been a real odyssey :P