DOKK / manpages / debian 10 / pmount / pumount.1.en
pumount(1) General Commands Manual pumount(1)

pumount - umount arbitrary hotpluggable devices as normal user

pumount [ options ] device

pumount is a wrapper around the standard umount program which permits normal users to umount removable devices without a matching /etc/fstab entry.

pumount also supports encrypted devices which use dm-crypt and have LUKS metadata. If a LUKS-capable cryptsetup is installed, pumount will umount the mapped device instead and call cryptsetup to close the decrypted device afterwards.

pumount expects the device as its only argument. This will umount device from a directory below /media if policy is met (see below).

Please note that, as with pmount, you can use labels and uuids as described in fstab (5) for devices present in /etc/fstab. In this case, the device name need to match exactly the corresponding entry in /etc/fstab, including the LABEL= or UUID= part.

Important note for Debian: The permission to execute pumount is restricted to members of the system group plugdev. Please add all desktop users who shall be able to use pmount to this group by executing

adduser user plugdev

(as root).

Lazy unmount. Detach the filesystem from the filesystem hierarchy now, and cleanup all references to the filesystem as soon as it is not busy anymore. (Requires kernel 2.4.11 or later.) IMPORTANT NOTES This option should not be used unless you really know what you are doing, as chances are high that it will result in data loss on the removable drive. Please run pumount manually and wait until it finishes. In addition, pumount will not luksClose a device which was unmounted lazily.

Normally, pumount will not luksClose (see cryptsetup(1)) a device pmount did not open. However, you can bypass this restriction with this flag. You probably will need it if you did mess around with the /var/lock/pmount_luks directory.

Print a help message and exit successfully.

Enable verbose debug messages.

Print the current version number and exit successfully.

The umount will succeed if all of the following conditions are met:

  • device is a block device in /dev/ (it does not need to exist if -l is supplied)
  • device is not in /etc/fstab (if it is, pmount executes umount device as the calling user to handle this transparently)
  • device is mounted according to /etc/mtab and /proc/mounts with the calling user's uid
  • mount point is in /media

pumount now supports unmounting devices that have gone missing for some reason, such as a brutal removal of the device, or a kernel/hardware problem. Just specify the mount point as argument for pumount.

pmount(1), cryptsetup(1), umount(8)

pmount is developed by Martin Pitt <martin.pitt@canonical.com>.

August 27, 2004 Martin Pitt