I periodically have to remount a few of my partitions that might have a couple users logged into my system and doing various things on the file system in question. Most of the time they're just idling, and I don't want to have to track down all the various processes I have to terminate so I can reset the test environment.

Is there a better way to see all the processes that are using a particular device? fuser (and 'fuser -k') never work. I tried digging though the very long man page for 'ps' and didn't see anything useful. Ideally, I would like to be able to do this from a script so I can just run a "restart" script that does everything in few moments without to much down time.

Any methods/suggestions?

Thanks!
...drkstr

try "lsof" on the file device in question, if you have that installed.

I do.

Thanks for the help Tux! I tried this before but at first it didn't look like it listed everything. Upon further reading of the man page, I was able to list everything (including the alusive ssh and ftp connections) with 'lsof +D /mnt/directory'. Although it listed every file that was in use as well. Looks like it's time for some perl scripting.

Thanks again for the help!
...drkstr

You're welcome. I use it personally to kill things that are using automounted devices. I double checked it by running on something I was mplayering, but didn't think about that network stuff. How does it not list everything? Doing +D feels like overkill, and whenever I've used it, it would list anything that used anything on the device in /dev, even though the actual file opened is in /mnt.

Hmm, looks like I'm going to need to change my sig.

heh, sorry tuxdev. I guess now that I think about it, it would be a little weird if someone called me drk.

Well it might help if I did it right. I did 'lsof /mnt' which only displayed a few processes, and did not pick up the idle network connections. 'lsof /dev' picked up all the stuff, without all the over kill of +D /directory. Might help if I follow directions a little more closely.

Thank you my friend!
...drkstr