Hi, is there in linux a command or
software via which is possible to
know the filesystem type of a cd
in the cdrom (and actually also
whether there is a cd in the cdrom
or not) without tring to mount it
or play it? if there were a way,
I could then write a script
so that clicking on the cdrom
could either mount it or play it
straight away, as in Windows!This is a
nice feature, and I was wondering whether
it is possible to mime it in linux
too!

Thanks for any help

Alex

Well, there are things like automount (perhaps difficult to unerstand), supermount (unstable), amd (difficult to understand) that will check to
see if there is anything in the drive, and mount it if so when you stat the
device. You should be able to set up an icon on your desktop that will
stat the device when you activate the icon.
I've heard of people using supermount that comes with some of the latest
releases of RH and MDK, but the last time I saw a modification date on
supermount was something like 1998. . .
automount works. If, after reading up on it, you need help, post back. . .

Don't know what RedHat does with supermount, but with Mandrake it worked well in 8.0, was brken in 8.1, and then worked well again in 8.2. AFAIK, it also works properly in 9.0.

should give you plenty of info :"cdrecord -toc"

I have checked supermount and automount, but I could not find them. I have then discovered that only with
"expert installation" you have those command.
As for amd, I could not find that either. Is it a red hat
command only? Should I update to 9.0?
As to cdrecord -toc, I could not find any useful
option....


Alex

Do a google search, those packages are out there.
What distro are you using?

Hi, I have Mandrake 8.1, and I found the package! it is
autofs, which manages the daemon in charge to
check the mounting every tot secs! The idea is then
that it automatically mounts the cdrom as soon as I try
to access it, and unmounts it after tot secs if notin use!
however, the firts option is already supported by KDE,
and as for the second one I can unmount simply asking
the cdrom to eject the disk, so....no help I think
unless you had something else in mind...
Also, I just verified that the mount command does not
return apparently any boolean value in response to the
operation of mounting, which seems incredible
8verified in a shell script as well as perl one).
However, I have written a c++ little program using
the sys/mount.h library where the mount
function returns a proper flag (=0 success, -1 failure)
together with an errn variable (to be found in <errn.h>)
which contains a numerical value which clearly and
univoquely defines the cause of trouble if any, so I think
I may just use this? (the idea is to setuid this
little program so that any user can launch it, which is
probably yhe way it is done in KDE as well, as only root
can use mount anyway)..
let me know of any cleverer way to do it, or if the way
I am tring is just dumb for some reason

Alex

I don't have a system here right now to test this or see what happens but it's just an idea. How about doing a fake mount, wouldn't that give you enough information to work with?

mount -fvn /dev/cd /mnt

The man page of mount should give you more information on that.

Well I guess it doesn't really work. I just tried it and it looks like it only tries to auto detect the filesystem after the first mount call fails. And with the -f option the mount system call is never executed. You could still try a mount and umount in the same way. Don't know what you'd get for a music cd or an unknown filesystem type though.