When I plug in a USB flash drive, how do I access the files?

You'll need to mount it first. As you plug it in, run "dmesg" to see which device it's attached to. You would mount the device with something like:

# mount -t msdos /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb

The -t option specifies the filesystem type, which might be different for your drive. "msdos" works for mine.

You might need to change the device, also. This will depend on what dmesg tells you.

The last bit of that line is the mount point, you can mount your drive where you like, but just make sure that that folder exists (so, if you did want to mount to /mnt/usb and it wasn't there already, you'd just do "mkdir /mnt/usb" as root).

If it is mounted successfully, you can just go into the directory you mounted to:

$ cd /mnt/usb

and access your files.

if it's not automatically mounted, you can mount it manually by creating a mountpoint (a directory) under /media/ and issuing in terminal:

sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /media/usbflash

or, if 'sudo' doesn't work, then su to become root and do

mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /media/usbflash

where 'usbflash' would be the directory you want to mount (read and write) the usb-stick into. '-t vfat' means to use FAT32 as the filesystem, because most if not all of the usb flash memory sticks use fat32 as their filesystem..in most cases it can be dropped off, though.

EDIT: if that one above won't work, then try to use sda2, sda3, sda4 or such instead of sda1. sda1 is the first device _usually_ but not _always_. I've had many flash memory sticks that must me mounted as sda4 though there is no reason why they couldn't be sda1..I don't know why exactly. but that's a clue.

What do I need to do (if anything) when I'm done using it, and want to remove it?

Thanks so far. It was on sda1.

You umount the device with

# umount /dev/sda1