Why directories mounted with autofs are not visible in filesystem, but are accessible once full path is provided?

Solution 1:

That's how autofs is supposed to work. The autofs directories are mounted when they are first accessed (that's why there is "auto" in the name). When you do a ls of the parent directory, there is no system call that would access the actual mountpoint path, so they are not visible. When you access explicitly the mountpoint path, it gets mounted. Try to do ls of the parent directory again, and you'll see that the mountpoint has appeared. After the mounted directory is not used by any process for 20 seconds (that's the timeout you have set in the config file), it gets unmounted again and is not visible anymore.