A cute CLI trick for emergencies

[Bryn M. Reeves]

On 12/07/2011 02:18 PM, Robert Nichols wrote:
> On 12/07/2011 12:19 AM, Joe Zeff wrote:
>> As part of getting my desktop working again, it'd help to be able to
>> mount and unmount my flash drive from a command line, but I couldn't
>> figure out how to work out just which device name to use.  A question on
>> fedoraforum had an answer in just a few hours, and I'm almost ashamed to
>> admit that I didn't think of it myself.  As root,
>>
>> fdisk -l
>>
>> will tell you exactly what you need.  D'oh!
>
> An issue with both the fdisk and blkid solutions is that they will spin
> up every sleeping drive on your system.  Looking at the output from dmesg
> won't do that.
>

That's only true of fdisk -l (with no other arguments). The blkid 
command operates out of a cache so will only spin up drives if run with 
-p (low-level probe). This also allows users without read access to a 
block device to retrieve label, file system type & UUIDs.

Regards,
Bryn.