Re: For you amusement

["Gary W. Billings"<obs681@telusplanet.net>]

>As I keep reminding myself, I am in the entertainment biz.
>
>Here is my problem with mount.
>
>tom] mount /mnt/cdrom
>tom] cd /mnt/cdrom
>cdrom] ls  (gets file list from CD rom)
>cdrom] umount /mnt/cdrom
>umount: /mnt/cdrom: device is busy  ***** failure *****
>cdrom] cd ..
>mnt] cd ..
>/] umount /mnt/cdrom
>succeeded


Yah, that's how it works.  Note that you your "present working directory" can
be *anywhere* except in /mnt/cdrom and you'll be able to umount /mnt/cdrom okay.
 E.g, you could cd to /home/tom and umount /mnt/cdrom, you just can't be in
/mnt/cdrom itself.

Also note, that if *any* session/shell (e.g., in another xterm window) has /mnt/cdrom
(or deeper) as present working directory, then umount will fail no matter where
you try to do it from.

Your struggles with Unix/Linux are pretty normal.  It's has a really formidable
interface, unless you use it a lot.  If you do, you'll learn to love it -- even
vi!  Heck, I like vi so much that I put vim on all my Windows machines...

Something that doesn't start to show up until you've used it quite a bit is
the power of "piping" standard output of one command to standard input of another.
 You can construct powerful functions on the command line that way.  I use a
GPL'ed seismic data processing system that works that way:  the binary seismic
data itself is piped from one operation to another.  These operations are pretty
"heavy duty", i.e., they perform computationally intense operations on the data.
 Extremely flexible, and relies on functionality that "just comes with" Unix/Linux.


Gary Billings