Getting a list of removable devices (and their partitions)

[tobr]

Hello.

I have a computer on which I run VDR (to watch TV etc.). I use fvwm as window manager because it's lightweight and highly configurable. Therefore I miss the automount capabilities of Gnome/KDE. I'd like to mount USB sticks and similiar devices with autofs but the problem is that this needs a config file and one can't know everything about the USB devices in advance. So I'd like to let udev execute a script whenever a removable device is plugged in, which creates a config file for autofs with the current removable devices and signal the daemon a SIGHUP to reread the file.

The problem is now to get a list of mountable partitions on the removable devices. Google yielded only something which uses HAL, which I'd like to avoid. So is there another way using as little extra programs as possible (I'd like to keep the system simple and small)?
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[ZeuZ_NG]

My guess is that you could make a pact with dmesg to check whether it has been plugged, and where the inode for the device was created on /dev, later you'll need to daemonize it, or add your user to root group (wich can be dangerous, so the first option is adviced), to be able to mount depending on the data extracted from dmesg output.
By the way, have you tried thunar? I think it's a default for xfce4 and serves your needs..
Well, continuing with that, to automat the process, you could do a for counting from 0 to the maximum ammount of USB ports that your PC has.

Then something like:
ls /mountpoint | grep $NUMBER | wc -l
would give you something for an if to jump from device mountpoint to device mountpoint.
I'm thinking on a ´bash-ee´way of doing it, perhaps this gives you some ideas.
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| Intel Core i7 920. | Intel DX58SO Extreme. |
| 8gb DDR3 1666mHz | 1TB 7200 RPM WD HDD.|
Unix´s guru view of sex:
unzip ; strip ; touch ; grep ; finger ; \
mount ; fsck ; more ; yes ; umount ; sleep.

[NeddySeagoon]

tobr,

I think udev can do all of this. I don't use the automount so my knowledge there is a bit sketchy.

The first step is to write some udev rules to create /dev entries for your devices and their partitions.
I have

[tobr]

First thanks for the thoughts!

[NeddySeagoon]

tobr,

udev gets events from the kernel when a device is added or removed.
The default rules act on both events, adding and removing entries from /dev

This suggests that you could handle theremove event yourself if you wanted to.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[a.b.]

Ivman does the job for me without much configuration:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_ivman

[ZeuZ_NG]