Cubelogic Improv

Sometimes the Finder refuses to unmount a disk or device for unexplicable reasons. So, from the Terminal (“au” is my disk volume name),

cube17:/Users/ep root# umount -v /Volumes/au
/dev/disk2s3 unmount from /Volumes/au
umount: unmount(/Volumes/au): Resource busy

A brute force solution would be

cube17:/Users/ep root# umount -f /Volumes/au

but sometimes it’s nice to know what’s keeping the device busy. Typically it’s some open file on the disk that is kept open by a running process. On Linux there’s the fuser command that tells you which process is using a file or directory, but fuser is not part of the standard OS X (Tiger) install. (Maybe it’s on Fink, but I don’t know the package name.) However, OS X does have the lsof command:

cube17:/Users/ep root# lsof | grep /Volumes/au
coreservi 96 root 8u REG 14,5 1024 805 /Volumes/au/Desktop DB
coreservi 96 root 9u REG 14,5 2 806 /Volumes/au/Desktop DF
Finder 19312 ep 19r REG 14,5 6703712 1151 /Volumes/au/ustr_ga/ustrega_20061111_01/Bounces/bugububol.aif

There are two bugs here: (1) the Finder is keeping open a file that I have not been using since two days ago, and (2) the Finder refuses to unmount a disk even if it is the only process using it. Relaunching the Finder will solve this. FTFF already!!

Technorati Tags: FTFF, Resource busy, fuser, lsof, unmount, Finder bugs, Eject volume