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6

I want to know how to umount my USB drive via command line. I am using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 32-bit.

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2  
Have you looked at man umount? – jasonwryan Aug 19 '12 at 8:14
    
Do you want to umount it via commandline or using a graphical interface? – student Aug 19 '12 at 8:20
    
via command-line – Pranit Bauva Aug 19 '12 at 8:27
up vote 50 down vote accepted

Suppose your usb drive is mounted to /media/usb then it would be sufficient to do 

sudo umount /media/usb

Suppose the your usb is /dev/sdb1 then you could also do

sudo umount /dev/sdb1

You may also have a look at the anwers of one of my questions, how to umount all attached usb devices with a single command: Umount all attached usb disks with a single command

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It just works! Thanks a lot! – Pranit Bauva Aug 19 '12 at 8:40
    
The command sudo fdisk -l can be helpful if you don't know where a drive is mounted. – Brian Z Mar 13 '15 at 4:12
    
argh why is it called umount and not unmount?? – ExceptionSlayer Sep 1 '17 at 4:40
up vote 3 down vote

You can also use

udisks --unmount /dev/sdb1

which does not require root.

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up vote 2 down vote

Better than using sudo to unmount as root, just install the pmount package and do:

pumount /media/usb

As man pumount says:

NAME
       pumount - umount arbitrary hotpluggable devices as normal user

SYNOPSIS
       pumount [ options ] device

DESCRIPTION
       pumount  is  a wrapper around the standard umount program which permits
       normal users to umount removable devices without a matching  /etc/fstab
       entry.
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no pumount on my system, none in my package repo to install, either. – michael Oct 13 '16 at 8:36
    
@michael_n Do you have Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 32-bit, as in the OP question? – beldaz Oct 13 '16 at 8:47
    
ubuntu 16.04 -- at some point, pumount must either have been deprecated, did it come from a 3rd party repo? – michael Oct 13 '16 at 8:53
2  
I see it -- one has to install pmount (which is why pumount wasn't matched when searching in in the package manager). manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man1/pumount.1.html – michael Oct 13 '16 at 8:54
    
@michael_n thanks, I've added mention of the package to help others in future. – beldaz Oct 13 '16 at 9:55

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