It seems like only ntfs-3g understands the mount option silent, which made the system assume that none of your harddrives were formatted with vfat... Replace your fstab entries with these:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/usb vfat,ntfs-3g users,rw,noauto,umask=000,relatime 0 0

/dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb2 vfat,ntfs-3g users,rw,noauto,umask=000,relatime 0 0

After running both mount /mnt/usb and mount /mnt/usb2 as root, do you also get permission errors when you try to manually open the folders /mnt/usb and /mnt/usb2 in your file manager?

Also, we only got the first few lines of /etc/group... Can you post the rest? You can get the entire contents at once like this:

cat /etc/group

marc wrote:

Doesn't "pwd" actually look for the $PWD variable? ;)

I believe you're right... I just wanted to show how to use the output of a command too, since he first tried using something like "pwd/filename" and not "PWD/filename" :-)

Replace the previous entry in /etc/fstab with this:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/usb vfat,ntfs-3g users,rw,noauto,umask=000,relatime,silent 0 0

That should create a more general entry that works with both your external harddrives. If you intend to work with both harddrives at the same time, you can create another mountpoint and /etc/fstab-entry:

su -c "mkdir /mnt/usb2"

/dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb2 vfat,ntfs-3g users,rw,noauto,umask=000,relatime,silent 0 0

The reason it didn't work out of the box this time, must either be due to permissions issues, or due to problems with HAL. We might be able to fix the automounting; could you post the contents of the file /etc/group so we can check if these are more permissions-issues?

I'm glad it worked!

Digiza wrote:

kept trying "pwd/c:osaso_security_rules.txt" and was giving strange errors :P

Aha... If you want the output of the environment variable PWD, you use $PWD. If you wanted the output of the command pwd, you could have used $(pwd) instead. They both would have done the same :)

marc wrote:

Would you mind explaing what that sentence does? I mean, step by step ;)

Sure, I'll explain everything :)

To take it from the beginning, you might be familiar with the basic logic operators '&&' and '||'. The following is used to run command_1, and then command_2 - if and only if command_1 is successful.

command_1 && command_2

This is used to run command_2 only if command_1 is not successful:

command_1 || command_2

In the original script, I wrote something like this:

( command_1 && command_2 && command_3 ) || ( command_4; command_5)

The parentheses are used to glue together several commands into one block of code. If one of the commands inside the first parentheses fails (that is, command_1, command_2 or command_3), it counts as if the whole block of commands fails - and then the '||' operator makes sure the second block of code is executed instead (command_4 and command_5).

But when a block of commands consists of seven different commands, the script gets easier to manage if the commands are spread through different lines. You can do this by escaping the newlines ("\\<newline>" ), so that Bash will ignore them:

( command_1 \\

&& command_2 \\

&& command_3 ) \\

|| ( command_4; command_5)

But the forums added whitespace to the end of each line, here represented by red underscores:

( command_1 \\[color=#FF0000]_[/color]
&& command_2 \\[color=#FF0000]_[/color]
&& command_3 ) \\[color=#FF0000]_[/color]
|| ( command_4; command_5)

This means that Bash reads "\\<space><newline>" instead of "\\<newline>", which makes the interpreter ignore the whitespace instead of ignoring the newline. (I discovered this by using gvimdiff to compare the old, working script I had on my harddrive with with a copy of the script I copy/pasted from the forums.)

I then used sed, a tool used for search-and-replace actions, to correct this. Using sed is quite simple:

sed 's/old/new/g' filename

The "s" stands for "substitute", the slash is a delimiter, and the "g" at the end means "global". Sed will then read the file filename and substitute every occurrence of "old" in filename with "new", and write the modified file to standard output.

In this case, I wanted to replace every occurence of '\\ ' with just '\\'. Since Sed itself interprets backslashes (so that you e.g. can replace all newlines by using '\\n', or all tabs with '\\t' ), the backslashes themselves have to be escaped. If we also escape the whitespace, the pattern '\\ ' becomes '\\\\\\ ', and '\\' becomes '\\\\'. We also want to save the output back to the original file by piping the output:

sed 's/\\\\\\ /\\\\/g' filename > filename

A more specific solution, and in many cases a better one, would be to replace '\\<space><newline>' with '\\<newline>':

sed 's/\\\\\\ \\n/\\\\\\n/g' filename > filename

If not given any input files, sed will read standard input, so something like this should work equally well:

cat filename|sed 's/old/new/g' > filename

The 'g' at the end can also be replaced with a number:

sed 's/old/new/1' # Replace only 1. occurrence of "old"

sed 's/old/new/2' # Replace only 2. occurrence of "old"

Hope this helps :)

Does this help?

scp "$PWD/c:osaso_security_rules.txt" gareth.thompson@prodtrans:/home/gareth.thompson/