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.

  • data1701d (He/Him)English
    2•1 day ago

    I have a Blu-ray drive, though my case doesn’t have 5.25” bays, so I just have the SATA cables come put the side.

    The sole reason I have it is because once a couple years back, I wanted to watch the Star Trek: TNG Spanish dub, which was only available in the US on a Bluray, which I promptly borrowed from my local library.

    I have used it a couple times after, though - once to burn a CD-R with TinyCore to boot on a Pentium II laptop, and once to backup a Bluray with a dub only available on that medium.

  • Captain AggravatedEnglish
    33•3 days ago

    tilts head

    plugs in USB optical drive

    eject

    pop

    hehe

    push tray back in

    eject

    pop

    hehehe

  • @[email protected]English
    123•4 days 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.

  • @[email protected]
    156•4 days 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!

    • arthurpizzaEnglish
      9•3 days 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.

  • @[email protected]English
    12•3 days ago

    There is a whole world of obsolete stuff nobody will ever do with a linux system anymore. Terminal servers with lots of serial terminals or modems for a BBS. Making a fax server, IVR, digital answering machine for analog land lines. Using removable optical or magnetic media. Recording broadcast tv. SCSI, Firewire. It is interesting to imagine what from today will be obsolete in a few years.

  • Courant d'air 🍃
    59•4 days 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 ✨

    • Tekhne
      6•3 days ago

      You could’ve made music out of ejecting/retracting those all at different times!

      Would’ve actually been fantastic distributed systems practice, synchronizing all of those to tight tolerances of music across a network connection…

  • Björn Tantau
    92•4 days ago

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

    • KhruxEnglish
      14•4 days 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.

  • @[email protected]
    71•4 days 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.

  • @[email protected]
    1•2 days ago

    I just tried and it doesn’t seem to work for me.

    Wait…do I need an optical drive for this to work? I think I might have a plug in drive somewhere…

  • Squiddlioni
    27•4 days 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.

    • flatbieldEnglish
      5•4 days 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.

      • swab148
        5•4 days ago

        I want it to work for all drives. Sometimes I just wanna launch my SSD across the room for shits and giggles, is there a bash command for that yet?