When I run this script...

I get this. ??

I am trying to copy to an external drive.

The script works when run from Puppy 5.9.3 ?

I don't recommend you run things as root, which is what it appears you're doing. Weird though then that it doesn't also have write privileges to that drive, unless that drive happens to be mounted as read-only. A simple issue of the mount command will show you what's mounted and what mode the media is mounted as, ro or rw.

Puppy Linux is designed for root use.

I use many security protocols.

All the drives are showing rw.

The place you want to put it seems to have an issue as far as I can tell.

What do you mean by issue ?

How have you mounted /dev/sdb1?

I would use:
And then copy the files to /mnt/Linux_Files/etc

I don't think sdb1 will appear in the filesystem -- it is a block device.

On my system, sdb1 is a NTFS external hard drive.

# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt
Mount is denied because the NTFS volume is already exclusively opened.
The volume may be already mounted, or another software may use it which
could be identified for example by the help of the 'fuser' command.

Having a directory named sdb1 under the /mnt tree is not a problem, it can have the same name as the device, the system can tell the difference. In fact I do this same sort of convention, myself.

A few things to try. Unmount it and then re-mount it. Verify that it is mounted where you believe it to be, i.e. what is the actual output of the mount command with respect to this particular external drive? When you do have it mounted, can you cd to a directory on there and create a file, like can you do something like:And then perform an ls -l to see what the attributes of that file are. Something is wrong with how you can access that drive, however right now it's not apparent.

Here's an example of a mounted read-only thumb drive added to my system as well as a two partition compact flash which is RW:I can't write to /media/Live_Distro because it is RO

I however can write to either of /media/3e0f0916-712c-49a4-baa0-71c903e8fa44 or /media/18d85447-a529-465e-b621-7e70f6744c2d because those are both RW. When I perform an ls -l on my /media directory, those mounted directories are owned by root and when I try to write data to them, I do have to be root.

This is all, already resolved supposedly by what you've said. The only other point is that as root I also have RWX permissions for those directories so make sure the directories allow root that access.

Further, make sure that the Linux_Files directory exists on your external disk. A copy will fail if the target directory is not present, even though the error says something totally different, I've seen misleading errors before. There are also other flags for cp, such as -v and -f.

total 397
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 336132 Dec 3 13:39 BACKUP
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12288 Dec 3 13:39 Linux_Files
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Nov 22 12:12 Linux_Image_Backups
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4096 Nov 13 23:45 Linux_ISOS
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4096 Dec 3 23:32 Macrium_Images
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Dec 4 15:05 prob.txt
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Dec 2 10:29 RECYCLER
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Dec 3 22:39 System Volume Information
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 2 Dec 4 15:05 test.txt
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 Dec 1 08:33 TOSHIBA SDD1
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 45056 Dec 3 23:32 Windows_Files

OK fine. It's somewhat helpful in that it shows that the subdirectory is RWX and owned by root.

Can you cd to that directory and create a file?Can you copy a file to there using the command line?If you can do these things, I have no real explanation, the cp in your script should work. You could put "set -xv" after the #!/bin/sh or #!/bin/bash line in your script to enable some verbose output, but not sure what it will tell you any more than what you're getting.

If you can't do those test things, then you need to figure out why. Right now I don't see any reason why those tests shouldn't work.

It will be one of those mysteries for now. :-)

I was able to create a file, but got a read-only file system message


# cp bookmarks.html /mnt/sdb1/Linux_Files/Tahr_6.0_bookmarks.html
cp: cannot create regular file ‘/mnt/sdb1/Linux_Files/Tahr_6.0_bookmarks.html’: Read-only file system

The only other thoughts that I have are that the file already exists where you want to copy it and it is locked, owned by another user, and/or the privileges do not allow even root to erase or modify it. I'd be curious if you could copy a totally different file to that same directory. Or if the file Tahr_6.0_bookmarks.html already exists.I keep coming back to "your root" you should be able to do this, and especially if you can create a file in the /mnt/sdb1/Linux_Files directory. So it would seem that either the source file bookmarks.html is locked somehow (very unlikely, especially for reading) or the target location/file is locked.

Thanks for all your help.

Puppy 5.9.3 is my main O.S., so this script works to backup up both of my Puppy distros.

Maybe Thunar or Tahr Puppy 6.0 has a bug ?

Why wouldn't you check how your drive was mounted actually? What is the "mount" command output?

# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt

Mount is denied because the NTFS volume is already exclusively opened.
The volume may be already mounted, or another software may use it which
could be identified for example by the help of the 'fuser' command