Hi, is there any way to manipulate files and anything on a USB stick or drive from command line, rather than from the usual desktop file managers like Nautilus, Dolphin , Krusader etc .


Thanking you all

Yes. Not when "anything" is "everything" but generally yes.

If you want a more specific answer, a more specific question would help.

EDIT: if it's just files then the mount command can be used to mount the file system after which there are many file manipulation commands ...

You can mount the usb drive with the standard mount utility, once that's done you can manipulate the files like any other file. Do you need to know how to mount the device?

Mounting:

The USB is automatically mounted, if it wasn't , it would not show up in the File Manger,
Mounting was preformed in the era of floppy etc, now Linux has caught up and mounts it fast!
In the DOS there was a command that was C:, or D: would mount the disk etc, Linux hasn't got that, like /dev/sda: or sda:
Which cause the head ache.

Do you have a specific question? If you already know how to mount the device, what do you want to do with the files?

Linux is a little more powerful and flexible than DOS; that inevitably means it is more complex too.

Here's mounting a file system on USB at the command line, as root
To be able to do that, I had to be familiar with the block devices on the system and recognise that /dev/sdc1 was the USB stick.

The Xfce file manager does not mount the USB device and shows it greyed out. It is not mounted until the user opens it.

you can give the usb a universal access :

Now it will be mounted under a specific directory, say for example /media/stuff

Now, as root, set the permissions of that directory by issuing the following commands.

cd /media
chmod -R 777 stuff/

You can also do

cd /media/stuff/
chmod -R 777 .
Same thing really..
this will give read write access for all users to the whole partition. This command operates on the root filesystem of the partition mounted there. You can also use chown to change the owner if you want. 'Nobody' is a good option if you dont want access control.

Your second option is to (as root) make a directory on your new filesystem and give the directory write permissions to all. This option confines 'free for all' permissions to just one directory. Either way, it works the same.


still I cannot access from the command line and manipulate the files etc .

Please post the commands you are using to manipulate files and any error messages

Hi Nylex:
Some of the file need to be accessed only "root", and I use Debian, in Debian you cannot log in as root , from the start, or use the Desktop as root, you can get access to everything as root only from console/terminal etc.

Yes, but what exactly do you want to do with the files? We can't read your mind!

Catkin, Thanks for you post, I don't have any command to access the usb stick and disk, from command line, if I did, I would not come and post here!

Nylex, thanks again, for the reply, I just do the usual thing with a file , copy, paste, alter few lines here and there, I usually do on fedora as root, on friend's computer!
But doing it on Debian is not possible, I believe KDE's Krusader has root access capability, but I use Gnome, and KDE does not do well on Debian, so I don't install KDE specific software.
Thanking you all for your replies, much appreciated!

Are they plain text files? Just use your editor (e.g. vi(m), Emacs, nano, etc.) as usual..

Edit: So, is the device mounted or not now?