Mounting and unmounting with dmenu

Mounting devices with the mount command is a hassle, at least for me. To mount devices with the mount command you need to be root but if you use any kind of file manager to mount devices you don’t need to be root. Have you ever wonder why is that. Well it’s simple they use a different kind of command it’s called udiskctl here the help.

Commands used

udiskctl

udiskctl has a lot commands. We will be using the mount and unmount commands.

Here is the help.

lsblk

What the lsblk command does is very simple, it lists block devices, and information related to those devices, some of the information it displays are the mountpoint, label, name, type, and so on. Here is an example

awk

Awk is a programming language, and whole new world of knowledge. I really recommend you take your time and learn it, that dosen’t mean by far I’m anywhere near of being perfect in awk, but I think I have some basic knowledge. We will use awk to filter the output of commands and select certain columns of the output.

cut

cut can be used to select and or remove some section in a line. Will be used here to parse the output of awk, why ? you might ask, why don’t I just use awk to do that too and the answer as always is because I’m an idiot, and couldn’t find any better way.

dmenu

Dmenu is not a command it’s sort of an app. What it dose is basally simple you give or rather pipe a bunch of data separated by newline to it, and it prompts you to chose from them once you select one of them it prints it, the option you chose, to standard output.

For example

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echo -e "choice 1\nchoice 2 \n choice 3" | dmenu

Mounting

Let’s put these commands together to build a mounting script. First I’m gonna put the script here and explain it after wards.

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#! /bin/sh

mount=$(lsblk -l -o NAME,LABEL,TYPE,MOUNTPOINT | awk '/[part|disk] $/ {print $1 ": " $2}' | dmenu -i -p "mount: " | cut -d':' -f 1)
[ ! -z $mount ] && notify-send "$(udisksctl mount -b "/dev/$mount")"

The First line tells who ever is going to run this script to use /bin/sh to run it. The mount= part is simply assigning a variable. The $() means to replace what every is returned or printed by what is inside the braces the alternative way is using ``.

The lsblk command, with it’s options, print the name, label, type, mountpoint. We will use the name to differentiate the partitions. The label to get their name, and mountpoint to know weather they need to mounted or not.

The awk '/[part|disk] $/ {print $1 ": " print $2}' takes the output of lsblk and filters the partitions which are not mounted and “prints” them with their “label”.

Now pipe this to dmenu and you get your list of unmounted drives.

The last part i.e. cut -f ':' -d 1 gets ride of the label and preserves the name of drive.

On The next line we check if the user chose anything, if so we mount and notify that it has been mounted.

Unmounting

The unmount script dose the same thing, but in reverse i.e. do use the unmount command with udisksctl

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#!/bin/sh

unmount=$(lsblk -l -o NAME,LABEL,TYPE,MOUNTPOINT |  awk '/[part|disk] \/.*$/&&!/nvme/ {print $1 ": " $2}' | dmenu -i -p "unmount: " | cut -d ':' -f 1)
[ ! -z $unmount ] && notify-send "$(udisksctl unmount -f --no-user-interaction -b "/dev/$unmount")"

Although there is a bit of difference with the awk command. Here I’m using something different to filter the output of lsblk. I’m using '/[part|disk] \/.*$/&&!/nvme/'. If you look closely these are two Regexp connected by an and(&&) operand, which means what ever comes through awk must satisfy both of these Regexp.

The first part /[part|disk] \/.*$/ looks for mounted drives, and the second part !/nvme/ filters out my main internal drive. And that’s it folks we have done it.