Re: Something never understood: see USB storage in CLI & mc
On Wednesday 18 May 2016 05:30:34 Ron Leach wrote:
> List, good morning,
>
> One aspect of Debian I've never managed to 'get', is how to 'see' any
> temporarily plugged-in USB storage device, from the command line or in
> mc. The machines in question are using Wheezy.
>
> I often use a machine (with only cli) to download overnight - this
> works well. But when I insert (say) a 2G or 4G USB storage, I cannot
> 'find' any mount referring to the USB storage.
>
> I assume that I have to mount the USB storage, but where should I find
> the reference for the physical device to mount? Best of all would be
> to make this process 'automatic', if I could.
>
> Not all the devices are formatted with vfat; I think some use ext(x),
> and some are dd'd ISOs. Because labelling these devices is not very
> practical, I'd like to be able to plug them in and check what they
> contain - before, perhaps, overwriting them with something new.
>
> I'd be interested in how other users organise this but, essentially,
> I'd be grateful for any advice on where to find the physical device to
> use in a mount command. And, as a secondary question (there are two
> points on offer for this one), how to mount it without knowing the
> device's fs.
>
> regards, Ron
This detection and auto-mounting of plugged in media is generally part of
the desktop you run. I am using TDE, up to date version r14, and when I
plug in my junk cell phone when its turned off, it goes into charge mode
until it topped off, then a TDE Daemon finds it and mounts
to /media/somenumber automaticly, giving it access perms only from the
owner of the desktop. Only 50 megs of ram so obviously its a fat-16
file system.
I doubt, if you are not running a desktop, that such an automount
facility is available or running on your system.
One way to do it manually is to run 'blkid' from a shell, which will
output a unique identifier for each device it can find. My phone for
instance, shows up in the list blkid outputs as
/dev/sdd: SEC_TYPE="msdos" UUID="2A21-0001" TYPE="vfat"
you could then construct a mount command, see mounts man page, useing
either the /dev/sdd (discouraged as it is not unique and yours may be a
different sd#) or the UUID=number, which will be different from mine,
using the vfat filesystem, mounted to /media/2A21-0001 in my case. The
UUID method is much the preferred method, and that is the name its
mounted at too.
I am pretty sure such an auto function could be hacked up in a bash
script, I've done them critters for 2 or 3 things here, but not this
since my gui of choice handles it.
But I think you can see from the above what needs to be done by hand if
your desktop isn't in use.
IHTH.
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
Reply to: