E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Feel free to email me.

Book

I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

Colophon

Built using Django, served by Apache and mod_wsgi. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive. The markup engine is Markdown.

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Try, try again

This is really one of the most maddening things that OS X does:

The disk "Foo" is in use and could not be ejected.

Try quitting applications and try again.

Hey, you're the damn computer -- try telling me what those applications are! Try telling me what files are in use! Try letting me override!

Monday, September 12th, 2005
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4 comments

Some related posts: Johnny can too code • QuickTime 0, Open Source 1 • Mac troubleshooting tips + bonus rant
• Comment from Quentin Stafford-Fraser , later that day

Agreed - this has always bugged me, and Windows does just the same.

Linux has an 'fuser' command which allows you to find out which processes are using a disk - you can do something like `fuser -vm /home`. I haven't found an equivalent in OS X, though there may be some combination of options to `lsof` which would give you something similar.

Either way, it should really be a button in the dialog box that would give you the info.

• Comment from Russell Edwards , 2 days later

Good call Quentin, man lsof reveals lsof +D [path] . Worked great for me.

• Comment from Paul , 3 days later

Very nice!

• Comment from Michael Abbott , 22 months later

I know I'm two years late, but I had the same problem today, and found this page on google.

I found that you can force an eject in the terminal: cd /Volumes and then type

hdiutil eject -force drive-name/

and it's gone! No idea really how safe this is. I quit everything first, but didn't want to reboot.

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