Comment 0 for bug 1483325

Consider the directory structure like this:

root@MIKE /tmp/ofs> ls -al
total 20
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Aug 10 18:09 .
drwxrwxrwt 9 root root 4096 Aug 10 18:09 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 10 18:09 lower
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 10 18:09 mounting
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 10 18:09 upper

Mounting upper over lower on mounting mount point works just fine:

root@MIKE /tmp/ofs> mount -t overlayfs myoverlay -o lowerdir=lower,upperdir=upper mounting/
root@MIKE /tmp/ofs> df -Th mounting/
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
myoverlay overlayfs 219G 94G 114G 46% /tmp/ofs/mounting
root@MIKE /tmp/ofs>

However if the directory name is misspelled (that is, we're providing wrong directory), the error message is misleading:

32 root@MIKE /tmp/ofs> mount -t overlayfs myoverlay -o lowerdir=IAMWRONG,upperdir=upper mounting/
mount: special device myoverlay does not exist

I'm running this on Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS, using 3.13.0-61-generic kernel.

I'm not sure if this fits under 'linux' package, but I can't seem to be able to find 'mount' package in Launchpad.