[mdlug] External Hard Drives: Mounting, Unmounting, Partial Mounting?

[Ingles, Raymond]

> From: Elisa Gomez

> is there a command I can run that will output some
> information about what's currently going on in there
> in a user-friendly format that I will be able to
> mostly understand? ;)

 lsof /media/externaldrive

 (Or whatever the drive is mounted on instead of "/media/externaldrive".)

 It will list all processes that have open files on that device ("lsof" is
short for 'list open files'). E.g., on my machine:

$ lsof /media/lgflash/
COMMAND   PID     USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE  SIZE NODE NAME
bash     5724 sorceror  cwd    DIR   8,97 23040    1 /media/lgflash/
vi      19990 sorceror  cwd    DIR   8,97 23040    1 /media/lgflash/

 ...I've got a shell prompt and a 'vi' running there. If you know the device
itself, you can sometimes get a bit more information that way, for example:

$ lsof /dev/sdg1
COMMAND   PID     USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE  SIZE NODE NAME
bash     5724 sorceror  cwd    DIR   8,97 23040    1 /media/lgflash
vi      19990 sorceror  cwd    DIR   8,97 23040    1 /media/lgflash
vi      19990 sorceror    4u   REG   8,97 16384 7069 /media/lgflash/.bookmarks.html.swp

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles                                   (313) 227-2317

  "I like the flag plenty, but I never forget it's only a
 symbol, a reminder of what we stand for, not a replacement
              for actually standing for it."
 - Bill Maher, "When You Ride Alone You Ride With bin Laden"
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