Baslinux mailing list

[Christof Lange <cce.zizkov AT volny.cz>]

Hi list, 

I have been trying to make the mounting of USB storage devices
more user-friendly and seem to need some help with scripting.

When I want to mount a floppy the device name is always 
the same, i.e. /dev/fd0 . So it is easy to write a script 
or an alias in order to mount and unmount the device. e.g.

    alias a:='mkdir /A ; mount /dev/fd0 /A'
    alias :a='umount /A ; rmdir /A'
 
With USB storages devices it is a bit more complicated. When I 
exchange them they show up at different addresses. When I tested
Sindi's and David's 2.4.31 kernels I realized that the first 
deviced plugged in turns up at /dev/sda1 , the second one at 
/dev/sdb1 , the third one at /dev/sdc1 and the fourth at /dev/sdd1 . 
After that the next device can be mounted from /dev/sda1 again. 

I would like to write a script that uses one or more mount points, 
but will be able to mount a new device with only one command, eg. 
u: (and :u for unmounting). The script, however, must be able to 
check where a device is. When I open the 'file' /dev/sda1 in 
Midnight commander I get an error message if the device does not 
exist and some contents if it exists. How can I check the contents
of these device files automatically? I tried: 

cat /dev/sda1 |head -n1|cut -b10 >/dev/null && echo sda1 exists

but this produced a lot of unwanted screen output (error messages 
obviously do not come from 'cat') and did not produce the 
wanted errorlevel for && in the script. 

Which Linux command could I use instead of cat? 

Christof




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