disk format question

[Warren Young]

On 1/8/2013 08:38, bartels wrote:
> On 01/08/2013 04:14 PM, Warren Young wrote:
>> On 1/8/2013 06:59, bartels wrote:
>>>
>>> The windows format.com
>>
>> format.com hasn't existed since the DOS days.
>
> That may very well be true, but I have a friend called locate:

I *had* a friend called "which", but he didn't find it.

I have now unfriended him. ;)

>>> My question is this: which device in /dev do I use?
>>
>> According to [this][1] it's probably /dev/sdb.  But please do read
>> through what I pointed you to first, and check its applicability
>> carefully before attempting this.
>
> 'Probably' is not good enough when the goal is targeted destruction :)

In that case, you shouldn't be looking at /dev names anyway.  They're 
assigned in order of device discovery, so the device that gets called 
/dev/sdb or whatever depends on what happened before your code ran.

Actually, it's even worse than that.

In Disk Management, you can permanently assign a USB key a different 
drive letter than the default.  Now when you put it in, it appears 
somewhere other than code blindly hard-coded with a /dev name expects.

Or, put two USB keys in, one gets called F: (say) and the other G:. 
Remove both.  Now plug the second back in...it's still called G:! 
Hence, it gets a different /dev name.

If this were Linux, I'd suggest basing your script's logic on device or 
filesystem UUIDs, but I don't know how to do that under Cygwin.

> Does windows leave a trail when mounting?

Oh, doubtless there's something buried in the NT device namespace, 
mentioned in the document I pointed you to.  Maybe you could dump two 
copies of it and diff(1) them, and assume that the one line that appears 
in the output is the new device.  Ugh.

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