I'm trying to unmount a device as a whole! Take note that a device such as a HDD can have multiple partitions and some of them can be mounted while others are not. Is there an easy way to unmount an entire device i.e. all mounted partitions on a given device like /dev/sdb?

Is there a single shell command (one-liner) for this?
Or do I have to write a script that iterates through /dev/sdb*?

Best regards!
~dis

You umount whichever partition(s) is/are mounted - easy enough to do as a one-liner.
Should you happen to have a filesystem on an unpartitioned disk, you can simply umount that as a single command.

when I press "eject" or "safely remove drive" it will unmount all the partitions belonging to that device. I do not know how it is solved, but definitely works.

syg00: Okay, so you're saying the easiest way is to use a shell script to iterate through all partitions and unmount those which are mounted?

pan64: I have a headless system, so there's no pressing "eject" or "safely remove". Additionally, those options will also spindown and unlink the device. This is not desired in my situation, as I'm trying to dismount any partitions and then format the hard disk.

EDIT: I found the one-liner I was looking for:
# umount /dev/sdb?*

I have another question. What is the recommended way to handle disk formatting, filesystem creation and un/mounting partitions in python on a linux system? Shall I simply call the shell scripts, or are there any packages for this purpose. I found python-parted bindings package, which seems to handle part of the stuff, but the documnetation is practically nonexistent.

~dis