[svlug] Confused about swap partitions

[Joe Buck]

On Fri, Sep 30, 2005 at 09:11:46AM -0600, Skip Evans wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> Since I've typically relied on whatever distro 
> I've installed to handle setting up partitions, I 
> don't have any real experience doing so for Linux 
> (done it for BSD, but there again, the install 
> handles it, and I've typically taken the defaults.)
> 
> I read over the link Rick sent through:
> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Linux/FAQs/partition.html
> 
> ...but what I'm confused about is that swap 
> doesn't seem to show up as an actual partition like:
> 
> /swap

That's right.  If it had a path, you could put files in it
or read files from it, and you can do neither.  The swap
partition is not part of the filesystem tree.

Swap partitions do show up in /etc/fstab, though it is possible
for a partition listed as swap in /etc/fstab to be inactive.
The "swapon" program enables swap, and "swapon -a" activates
all swap partitions mentioned in /etc/fstab.
Read "man fstab" for details.