Don't exactly know how to make an alias that would allow me to view the contents of a floppy or CD each time I put a new one in. Currently I have:

alias a:='mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy | ls /mnt/floppy'

this doesn't work when I put a different floppy in the drive, it still remembers my last floppy. I have to manually umount /dev/fd0 then mount it again to see the new contents.

In Linux there is no specific filesystem drive number(if I said that correct), Linux deals with things in terms of one big filesystem with other filesystems joining (mounting) to the root(/)filesystem tree, therefore there would be no 'e:\' or 'c:\'. To do what you need, it would have to look something like this:

Most every device you mount would be in the '/dev' (device) directory, and most every "mount point"(the point to which the filesystem ajoins) would be located in '/mnt'(mount). An alias would look something like this:

Also remember that you have to change out of the mount point directory (/mnt) before you unmount the filesystem, otherwise the filesystem is still ajoined even if you try to unmount it with 'umount <dev>'.

Tarts

Thank you for that Tarts, I was wondering why I couldn't umount while in the /mnt/floppy directory. I have customized my alias's to look like this

alias a='mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy ; ls /mnt/floppy
alias a-='umount /dev/fd0'

I just like using 'a' for now because that's what I've been so used to using for ever in DOS. Maybe I'll change it when I'm not such a newbie. However these alias's seem to work for me and allow me to chang out my floppy disk when needed. Thank you for your help. I'm still not sure what the difference using && and ; to seperate commands is.

When using "&&" between the commands the second command will execute only if the first command returns a successful value. Using the semi-colon will cause the commands to execute in order regardless of the return values.