What is /mnt for?

I've never seen it used before..just curious..

 

/mnt directory.

 

Thing is, all I've seen used is /media.....

 

Depends on the distro. I have seen both /mnt and /media.

 

/media is a newer phenomenon used with automounters, /mnt is old school

 

When I mount via terminal.
I use /media....

 

/media is more 'correct', but /mnt is less key presses

 

As previously stated, /media traditionally is used for automounting hotplug devices like flash drives, while /mnt is used for mounting extraneous partitions during boot in fstab (e.g. /mnt/windows for your Windows partition) and persistent fileshares. At least that's how it's been in my experience.

But again, there's no solid rule stating how these directories are to be used, so it's purely tradition/convention.

 

/mnt is the canonical directory for mount points. All these uppity desktop environments have started making their own directories for that though ;/

 

Ethyriel and srunni have it right. In the olden days, on most Unix and Unix-like systems, /mnt was the place under which you would mount random file systems. You might have had a few standard mount points like / and /home but media of a more general nature were under mounted /mnt. There was no such thing as /media. Linux was the same for quite a long time.

Then they came up with /media.

To this day, every ad hoc partition I mount manually, I mount under /mnt instead of /media. Since /media is managed, I don't like to manually mount stuff there in case that confuses the whatever cares to manage that directory.