Hint and kinks

unmounting a USB disk

Sometimes a user has cd'ed to a USB disk and then if someone else tries to unmount the disk they will get this message:

 looking for message, stand by

The solution is to find the offending process and kill it cold. If the disk is labeled '120514a', then the steps are:

  lsof | grep 120514a

you might see something like this

bash 8367 dgs cwd DIR 8,49 20480 61341743 /media/120514a/user/cs

you can now kill this offending process as

  kill -9 8367

and then you can do

  umount /media/120514a