this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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Debian operating system

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Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 59000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.

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If one unmounts a disk, is that disk still available for write and can the following sync do anything?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Some people follow their GPS into the drink, and other people ask spicy autocomplete how to admin their computer.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

One only relies on ChatGPT for 1) imagining science fiction story lines and devices 2) Only where one knows the correct answer already. This instance is kind of a one-off. Spicy autocomplete - lol : ^ )

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago

Yes to the first question. I could be wrong, but I think you have to run umount on the directory sdx is mounted on, not sdx itself.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Uhm, been a while since I had to think of this but pretty sure you used to need to do that the other way around. Sync before unmount, else things may still be being written to disk.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Surely an unmount forces a sync.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

Yeah I'm thinking about fuse filesystems and hotplugged USB keys though. There was a time when the feedback about devices being ready to unplug was bad for users.

This answer suffered the fog of time. Never needed it with the unmount command.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

I was under the impression that the sync command makes device removal safer somehow. Even though the device was unmounted, there may be cached data that wasn't written yet. Could be wrong about that, but it seems harmless to include.

Edit: looked it up, and umount calls sync, so there's no need to include it. And if you do include it, sync before umount, like you said.