2.3. Unmounting a File System

To detach a previously mounted file system, use either of the following variants of the umount command:

umount directory
umount device

Note that unless you are logged in as root, you must have permissions to unmount the file system (see This content is not included.Section 2.2.2, “Specifying the Mount Options”). See This content is not included.Example 2.9, “Unmounting a CD” for an example usage.

Important

When a file system is in use (for example, when a process is reading a file on this file system), running the umount command will fail with an error. To determine which processes are accessing the file system, use the fuser command in the following form:

fuser -m directory

For example, to list the processes that are accessing a file system mounted to the /media/cdrom/ directory, type:

~]$ fuser -m /media/cdrom
/media/cdrom:         1793  2013  2022  2435 10532c 10672c

Example 2.9. Unmounting a CD

To unmount a CD that was previously mounted to the /media/cdrom/ directory, type the following at a shell prompt:

~]$ umount /media/cdrom