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* Greg Freemyer
Do you guys know what your talking about? I hope not!!!
of course.
I thought the usb flash drives were mounted SYNC, meaning that there are not any kernel buffers maintained.
If a drive is *mounted* is is *unsafe* to remove. An unmounted (umount) is not available for writing/reading and *is* safe to remove. Time for you to return to the Administrative Guide and the User Guide provided with your distribution.
Therefore if all the files are closed it is safe to pull it out. (Much better than Windows where you have to tell Windows to disable the thumb drive.)
I don't tend to work directly on my flash drives, just copy things on and off.
I normally do things from the command-line, so as soon as any copy commands finish, I just yank it out.
I wish you well, but think not.
If I was concerned that something might be using the USB drive in the background, I would use the 'fuser -m /media/usb-*' command.
This will indicate that it is unsafe to remove but *not* that it is safe to remove. -- Patrick Shanahan Registered Linux User #207535 http://wahoo.no-ip.org @ http://counter.li.org HOG # US1244711 Photo Album: http://wahoo.no-ip.org/gallery