Umount stubborn devices

By | November 7, 2008

We’ve all been there: you want to umount a certain device and you’re being told the resource is still being used. Maybe you forgot to close the Nautilus window or maybe you are still accessing the device from the command line. To find out for sure, use fuser.

If, for example, you can’t umount your iPod, use

fuser -v -m /media/ipod

The output will be a list of processes and users currently accessing the device. Find the ID of the corresponding process and kill it with

kill -9 PID

Fuser can also tell us what processes currently access certain network ports:

fuser -v -n tcp 21

This will tell us what applications are using the FTP port.

One thought on “Umount stubborn devices

  1. Atul Khachane

    You can umount a partition in lazy way too

    #umount -l /media/ipod

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *