terminal - how to find my external hard drive using unix commands

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Level 1

5 points

terminal - how to find my external hard drive using unix commands

just discovered terminal and using cd and ls commands, which are the only commands i know, i realized that i can't find my external hard drive. i thought it would be listed on my desktop, as it is in the OSX interface, but it isn't there.

not that im skilled enough to use terminal yet, but i thought the first step would be being able to navigate the computer's files.

really curious as to where my external hard drive is and how i can find it using unix commands in terminal.

i was trying to figure it out myself, then i thought surely someone knows this and could tell me in a sec.

thanks.

ibook Mac OS X (10.4.4)

ibook Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Posted on Feb 13, 2007 3:04 AM

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Answer 1

Feb 13, 2007 7:02 AM in response to houden

"ls /Volumes" will list all volumes, including internal and external hard drives and mounted disk images. I find "disktool -l" more useful in scripts, as it tells you which volume names correspond to which "mount points" under /Volumes. Usually they're the same, but if you have two volumes with the same name, or you try to remount a removable volume before it is fully unmounted, you'll end up with a mount point that consists of the volume name with a numerical suffix.

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Answer 2

Feb 13, 2007 3:50 AM in response to houden

External storage devices are mounted under /Volumes so if you

cd /Volumes

and/or

ls -l /Volumes

you will see your external hard drive there.

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Answer 3

Andreas

Level 4

1,510 points

Feb 13, 2007 8:10 AM in response to houden

Before you use disktool you should see what man disktool advises. 🙂

Apologies, John Chew, like you I also used to use disktool.

G5 2.1GHz Mac OS X (10.4.8)

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Answer 4

Feb 13, 2007 8:25 AM in response to Andreas

Yes, disktool is deprecated in favour of diskutil, but diskutil won't give you a list of all the volume name - mount point associations in one invocation, but requires N+1 invocations instead.

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Answer 5

Andreas

Level 4

1,510 points

Feb 13, 2007 11:21 AM in response to John Chew

What's wrong with diskutil list and/or, for instance, df?

G5 2.1GHz Mac OS X (10.4.8)

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