How do I write a script to identify and manipulate a specific drive in the terminal?
Multi tool use
How do I write a script to identify and manipulate a specific drive in the terminal?
I'm trying to write a short script that can automatically unmount and remount a partition, without knowing where the drive is currently mounted.
The following command sort of works for me:
sudo umount /dev/sdX
sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sdX /mnt/rec
The issue is, I'm running Linux live, and can't install it on my hard drive. As such, whenever I reboot the computer, /dev/sdX will sometimes mount as /dev/sdb, or /dev/sdd. As such, I can't just run a script to automatically mount the drive where I need to, without using
sudo fdisk -l
In order to verify what the drives are currently mounted as.
My question is: Is there a way to identify a drive, that's agnostic to where it's currently mounted?
UUIDs are what you're looking for.
– rkta
Jul 1 at 7:19
1 Answer
1
Yes!
This was an annoying issue up until 2005 or so, but now can access devices based on device-independent identifiers thanks to udev.
udev
Check out /dev/disk/ for all the various ways in which your partitions are automatically categorized independently of their /dev/sd* name:
/dev/disk/
/dev/sd*
$ find /dev/disk/
/dev/disk/by-uuid
/dev/disk/by-uuid/d7a395e4-e6fd-49bc-bbd9-af9c6a43211d
/dev/disk/by-partuuid
/dev/disk/by-partuuid/4434a42f-01
/dev/disk/by-path
/dev/disk/by-path/acpi-VMBUS:01-scsi-0:0:0:0-part1
/dev/disk/by-path/acpi-VMBUS:01-scsi-0:0:0:0
/dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:00:07.1-ata-2
/dev/disk/by-id
/dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x600224805c60e27d40a2d50b3961022c-part1
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-3600224805c60e27d40a2d50b3961022c-part1
/dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x600224805c60e27d40a2d50b3961022c
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-3600224805c60e27d40a2d50b3961022c
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-Virtual_CD
These are all completely transparent symlinks to their backing device, so you can easily see what they correspond to:
$ ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/d7a395e4-e6fd-49bc-bbd9-af9c6a43211d
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 May 28 10:38 /dev/disk/by-uuid/d7a395[..] -> ../../sda1
The by-uuid entries are generally your best bet, but partuuid and label may also be useful for less Linux-y file systems.
by-uuid
partuuid
label
Thank you! This works. I'd like to add, where you would use the statement:
/dev/sdX You can replace it with: UUID="000000000000000" Where the zeros is your device UUID.– Reizh A. Samouël
Jul 1 at 21:38
/dev/sdX
UUID="000000000000000"
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What does it mean to identify the drive independent of where it is mounted? What's on the drive to tell you it is the one you're after?
– Jonathan Leffler
Jul 1 at 6:55