Detecting USB Thumb Drive when Ready in Linux Shell Script

Question

I am a Windows admin and dev, I do not generally work with Linux so forgive me if this is in some way obvious.

I have a not so good Linux box, some older version of Open SUSE, and I have a script that unmounts the USB thumb drive, formats it, and then waits for the device to become ready again before it runs a script that does a copy/MD5 checksum verification on the source and destination file to ensure the copy was valid. The problem is that on one box the USB thumb drive does not become ready after the format in a consistent way. It takes anywhere from 1 to 2+ minutes before I can access the drive via /media/LABELNAME.

The direct path is /dev/sdb but, of course, I cannot access it directly via this path to copy the files. Here is my shell script as it stands:

#!/bin/bash
set -e
echo "Starting LABELNAME.\n\nUnmounting /dev/sdb/"
umount /dev/sdb
echo "Formatting /dev/sdb/"
mkfs.vfat -I -F32 -n "LABELNAME" /dev/sdb
echo "Waiting on remount..."
sleep 30
echo "Format complete. Running make master."
perl /home/labelname_master.20120830.pl

Any suggestions? How might I wait for the drive to become ready and detect it? I have seen Detecting and Writing to a USB Key / Thumb DriveAutomatically but quite frankly I don't even know what that answer means.

Answer 1

It seems that you have some automatic mounting service running which detects the flash disk and mounts the partition. However, you already know what the partition is, so I recommend that you simply mount the disk in your script, choosing a suitable mount point yourself.

mkfs.vfat -I -F32 -n "LABELNAME" /dev/sdb
echo "Format complete, remounting"
mount /dev/sdb $mountpoint #<-- you would choose $mountpoint
echo "Running make master."
perl /home/labelname_master.20120830.pl