Could these kind of tips get a large "unix nerds only" flag? Not only the fact that possibly 0.5% readers of MacOSxhints will find this useful its also simply wrong:

- as long as no external disks are mounted it is no problem to edit a /etc/fstab with any modern editor like BBEdit or emacs. No need for fancy outmoded vi-tools. We don't use punch cards either in the 21.century ;-)

- there is no /etc/fstab in OSX 10.5! At least not in my system. There is one file called /etc/fstab.hd which content is (I think since 10.3):

"This file does nothing, contains no useful data, and might go away in
future releases. Do not depend on this file or its contents."

Wow! I love emacs, and I use it most of the time. Except when doing sysadmin work. For which there is no better editing tool than vi. It's the only full-screen editor that you're likely to find on every *nix. And at every runlevel (yes, I know; that's not BSD lingo).

And it's not safe to manually modify a system file without locking it. That's what vifs does, based on my reading of the man page. For the same reason you always use vipw to modify /etc/passwd, not vi.

Now you may argue that Darwin users don't need to hear this level of complexity. And I'd agree that for most users that's likely true. But it doesn't hurt to tell the complete story either. The disinterested will get bored and skip to the end of the hint for the good part. But it might save someone a lot of work recovering from a bad problem someday.

Just my two cents. Thanks for listening.