Troy Johnson wrote:

> Brian,
>
> What you did when you:
>
>   $ mount redhat.iso ./ -o loop
>
> was mount the loopback accessing the redhat.iso file on the _current_ directory, thus hiding _everything_ in the current directory, including the redhat.iso file. Don't do that. :-)  Make a directory and mount the file via loopback on that.

That actually sounds like it could be a good thing in certain situations.
:-)


>    $ mkdir rhcd
>    $ mount redhat.iso ./rhcd -o loop
>
> What florin said was to hand "umount" that directory mount name as an argument (not the redhat.iso file name, which is hidden), and that might make things right again.
>
>    $ cd /directory/of/mounted/loopback/iso/..
>    $ umount /directory/of/mounted/loopback/iso/
>
> If it does not, then rebooting is probably the least problematic way of accomplishing that task.
>

Actually I thought you couldn't unmount a directory your using.  If you change to that directory you are using it.  It never works this way for me.
If it works than I am doing something wrong.  Otherwise just change to a different directory and umount it as stated above.

Sometimes it's just faster to reboot though.  You could have fixed it several times over by now.  But then again you might have made the same mistake and that is really a waiste of time.
:-)


> > Unmount by mountpoint.
> >
> > cd ..
> > umount <whatever>
>
> yes, but since the ISO is nowhere to be found, I can't just umount
> redhat.iso, I need to point umount to the actual file, which can't be
> found.

Even if the file was found it still wouldn't unmount it.  It's a file not a filesystem or mount point.  You don't umount /dev/cdrom.  You umount /mnt/cdrom instead.

>
> I was going to try Jay's suggestion (the logical one) but I wanted to see
> if there was a more creative way of doing this one.

Maybe easier but what happens when you run into this problem again?

HTH,
sim