How to mount a subdirectory at boot time
 

I have a partition, sda8, that gets mounted as /share1 at boot time by it's entry in /etc/fstab. What I NEED is to actually have:

/share1/this_dir mounted as /this_dir
and
/share1/that_dir mounted as /that_dir

I tried using fstab, couldn't make it work - I guess it just mounts partitions, not subdirs.

After booting, I can issue the command:
mount --bind /share1/this_dir this_dir

This works great, but I don't want to do this EVERY time I reboot.

I tried putting this in /etc/skel/.profile doesn't work?

Any ideas?
Thanks in advance,
Terry.

Yes, you can only mount partitions (devices) that way.

To access the subdirs I would mount it then create symlinks into the mounted subdirs. Then you would access this_dir and that_dir by the symlinks. When sda8 was not mounted the symlinks would remain but simply be dead ends, but would be valid again when the device is mounted.

After rebooting, via /etc/fstab, /dev/sda8 gets mounted as /share1.
If I issue the following command:
ln -s /share1/this_dir this_dir
then try ls -l, I get:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Jul 7 00:36 this_dir -> /share1/this_dir/

ok, hang on... I got to smart for myself.

When I do a normal ls, I get all my files!

Question for you astrogeek, when I issue the ln -s /share/this_dir this_dir command, the symlink exists over multiple boots, right? <-- of course it does. -->

Cheers,
Terry.

How about this in /etc/fstab

where 'this_dir' is one of directory in '/dev/sda8'. Also note that when you do this, other than 'this_dir', all other sibling directories of 'this_dir' in /dev/sda8 are not accessible.

Another possible way would be adding the command

mount --bind /share1/this_dir this_dir

to the local initscript like

/etc/rc.d/rc.local
/etc/init.d/local
/etc/local.d/local.start

or whichever file this is on your distribution.