Eject USB drives / eject command – Unix & Linux Stack Exchange

I always thought than an umount /dev/sdX# for all partitions on /dev/sdX was enough for USB devices to be ejected, but there are three commands that (on most systems) actually power down USB drives (or USB to SD card adapters):

• udisks --detach /dev/sdX (requires the udisks package which is obsolete)
• eject /dev/sdX seems not to be enough on some systems; it is part of the util-linux package
• udisksctl power-off -b /dev/sdX is equivalent to the udisks command; it is part of the udisks2 package.

These will ensure that the disk is not part of the fdisk --list output any more.

The opposite of these is sg_start, which is from the sg3_utils package.

Source: [WayBack] Eject USB drives / eject command – Unix & Linux Stack Exchange

On MacOS, you can use  diskutil eject /Volumes/<LABEL> (source: answer by efesaid on [WayBack] Eject USB drives / eject command – Unix & Linux Stack Exchange)

–jeroen