I’ve been using linux for more than a decade at this point, but in all that time I’ve rarely had a disk drive. The fact that this command exists and is just, one of the core utils included with your distro along with su and kill and mount and more is just… so beautiful. 10 years amore with this OS and I’m still learning things that the elders in the audience are snickering at me for only learning 5 minutes ago while they were popping their disk trays open with a single command back when disk drives were a non optional component.

  • DeuxChevaux@lemmy.world
    136·
    1 day ago

    Very helpful command it was for those, whose modem had to be rebooted daily back in the day: Have a cron-job open the tray, which in turn was placed strategically so that it would hit the reset button of the modem, then close the tray. And voilà; automatic reboot of the modem. Robotics at its finest!

    • arthurpizza@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      5 hours ago

      In the early 2000s, only my rich friends had cell phones. My roommate and I both had accounts on each other’s machines so we could telnet into them on the same local network.

      We used to do this all the time to each other. It was funny to us 25 years ago. It’s still funny now.

  • plum@lemmy.zipEnglish
    106·
    24 hours ago

    This command was very useful for quickly finding a server in a row of hundreds of identical servers. No need to read the labels or look up which rack it’s in. Just log in remotely, just use ‘eject’, and then walk down the row to the server that has its tray out.

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
    85·
    1 day ago

    Ah, the good old days of sshing into a family member’s computer and trolling them by constantly opening and closing the drive.

    • Khrux@ttrpg.networkEnglish
      13·
      1 day ago

      It it to wait 30 mins then do it every 10, and pop it in startup, those were the days.

      The other was Free_Cupholder.EXE. I miss disk drives for this reason more than for actual use.

  • horse_battery_staple@lemmy.world
    68·
    1 day ago

    You can configure sudo, used to elevate the privileges of a command, to insult users when they type in an incorrect password.

    To do so, edit the sudoers file with a tool called visudo, which edits and validates modifications to the sudo configuration file.

    sudo visudo

    Near the top, add a line that reads:

    Defaults insults

    Save and close the file.

  • Courant d'air 🍃@jlai.lu
    53·
    1 day ago

    Back in networking classes we used to have entire rooms of replicated machines, all with contiguous addresses and same logins. We wrote a script to ssh into every computer of the room and eject and retract all the disk drives at the same time, it was wonderful ✨

  • Squiddlioni@kbin.melroy.org
    26·
    1 day ago

    Almost 20 years ago I convinced my high school library to let me install Debian on one of the computer groups. I found the “eject” command, and wrote a script that just invoked it with an argument to close the tray. I named that script “inject”. Being high schoolers, my friends and I made scripts to “eject” and “inject”, along with various beeps, and named the scripts suggestive and tawdry things. We all had a good giggle setting the systems off on their little routines and walking away.

    • flatbield@beehaw.orgEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      Eject is not just for CDs. You still have to eject any hot mount physical media. Sadly the eject command only works in some cases. I do not think it works for hot mount SATA dives for example.

  • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
    18·
    1 day ago

    If you have a LS-120, it will eject the floppy disc like you were on dome fancy-pants Macintosh!

    • Quazatron@lemmy.world
      12·
      1 day ago

      I’ve never encountered another LS-120 user before. When it came out I assumed it would be the future, because 120 megabyte freaking laser assisted floppy, am I right? Turns out I was very much mistaken, and CD-R took over.

      I also made the same mistake regarding CF vs SD cards.

        • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
          2·
          3 hours ago

          I’m hoping for MacroSD. About the size of a 3.5" floppy so you won’t lose it easily.

          Seriously, it’s interesting that now that we have the tech to make a useful-capacity storage device the size of a credit card, we don’t. Not like those crappy giveaway flash drives printed with a card design, where they had a captive USB head and were 4x as thick as a card, but something with just contacts like a chip card, so you might need to use an external reader but it really preserves the wallet-size concept.

          I’d love to have a cheap 16GB card in my wallet with all my health records and a cryptographically signed copy of my will as a one-stop, no cloud required, emergency kit.

      • markstos@lemmy.world
        2·
        16 hours ago

        120 MB? That’s more than a ZipDisk!

        I knew I attended a well-funded modern college because all the computers had been upgraded with ZipDrives.

        • Quazatron@lemmy.world
          1·
          12 hours ago

          Yep, Zip drives only had 100MB, the disks were clunky and were prone to get the Click of Death (not that LS-120 disks were any better in that sense, of course).

  • mumblerfish@lemmy.world
    16·
    1 day ago

    They should make a usb-port with a spring in it which can be released with eject. Until then I have to be content with just making sound effects when I run eject on other devices.

  • philluminati@lemmy.ml
    11·
    1 day ago

    I used to play with Linux at college back in 2002 and install the distros on the front of magazines. Eject opens the cd drive but did you know it hangs unless you umount the mount point first? Back in those days everything had to be painfully mounted and unmounted.