5.1-BETA umount problems

[David Schultz]

On Mon, May 19, 2003, Makoto Matsushita wrote:
> 
> truckman> IMHO, "umount -f /lib" should have failed in this case.
> 
> I don't think so.  -f means 'force', so it should be successed even if
> this cause something trouble to running system.  If it would be
> unacceptable, there's easy way to solve it: don't use -f anymore, or
> add a new umount(8) option to do that.

umount -f can be extremely useful on a multiuser system when you
*really* want to unmount a filesystem regardless of who might be
trying to use it.  However, it also makes it easy to shoot
yourself in the foot.  If it only fails in situations where you
are absolutely guaranteed to shoot yourself in the foot, that's
fine.  There's no reason it should allow someone to unmount a
filesystem that contains a mountpoint for another mounted
filesystem.

By the way, why is the original poster walking around and shooting
himself in the foot?  Sigh.  The dangers of firearms...