Mount Disk

Watch the disks.

The partition with the MOUNTPOINT which is just / holds the entire operating system you're on, so don't mess with it. It's probably called sda3.

1watch -n 5 -d lsblk -f

Put the USB stick in, and it will show up with a highlight for 5 seconds (adjust that -n 5 to -n 10 if your USB ports are difficult to reach).

If disk's FSTYPE is ntfs then the USB stick was created on Windows. You can't write to it without installing the ntfs package (probably called ntfs-3g or similar).

Mount the disk somewhere in /mnt:

1
2target=`${/mnt/1}`
3disk=/dev/sdb1
4
5sudo mkdir "${target}"
6
7sudo mount "${disk}" "${target}"
8
9ls "${target}"

Once you're done, leave the directory where the disk is mounted, and close any files you have opened from the disk.

Unmount the disk:

1sudo umount "${target}"

Once you unmount the disk, it's not actually unmounted - it's just says it has because it's about to. Check that it's really unmounted:

1sync

If this all goes wrong, you can force the disk to umount early. This might destroy some files on the USB stick, so best to wait a while to see if any problems fix themselves.

1sudo umount -l "${disk}"