Why is "sudo unmount" required for unmounting an sshfs-mount if it was mounted without sudo privilges?

I have an sshfs FUSE filesystem mounted in ~/mountpoint. I tried umount mountpoint and diskutil unmount mountpoint (on a Mac here) and both failed. I used sshfs -o IdentityFile=<key> user@hostname:/home/<user> ~/mountpoint; none of that required sudo.

Why, then, do unmount it do I need sudo privilges?

1 Answer

Because umount only allows root to unmount regular filesystems.

You can, however, unmount any FUSE filesystem (inclusing sshfs) without using sudo:

fusermount -u mountpoint