Alias for pen drives

[Tim]

On Sun, 2007-09-30 at 11:31 +0100, Paul Smith wrote:

> The alias '/dev/dvd' is for dvd. What is the alias for pen drives?

They'll be another pseudo-SCSI drive (/dev/sd something).  Whether it's
sda, sdb, etc., will depend on what other drives are on your system, and
how the interfaces are managed.

This system has two internal hard drive, they're /dev/sda and /dev/sdb.
I'd expect that plugging in a USB flash drive would be /dev/sdc, but
sometimes it's a higher letter.  I haven't worked that one out yet.

Another of my systems has one internal hard drive, and one of those
multi-card readers (SD, Compact, etc.).  If I add a USB flash drive, it
gets a much higher letter than I expect.  I imaging that's due to the
multi-card reader grabbing some devices, even if there's no memory cards
plugged into it.

This unpredicability is why labels are so useful.  You can label a drive
with a name, and always find it by that name (later on), no matter where
it's plugged in.

If you don't want to use labels, your other option is making UDEV/HAL
rules.  You'd pick something identifying about your device (e.g. that
flash drive, or all flash drives), and assign them a device name of your
own choosing.  I used to do that with my Polaroid camera.  If I plugged
it in it be /media/usbdisk, and I couldn't tell it apart from flash
drive plugged in at the same time (there'd be two /media/usbdisks, and
I'd have to remember which was plugged in first).

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