What's the difference between mountall and mount -a? (Ubuntu, perhaps others)
According to the man page, the ubuntu version of mountall does the following :
- reads fstab(5)
- calls fsck(8)
- calls mount(8)
- and calls swapon(8)
Canonical does not provide much information on the reason why they had to build a "temporary tool".
According to mount manual, mount -a "[...] causes all filesystems mentioned in fstab to be mounted[...]".
Anyway, I advise you to use mount -a as it works on most unices.