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I'm mounting a truecrypt container via the command line (i.e. truecrypt file dir). Is there any way to have truecrypt automatically unmount the container after a given amount of inactivity in dir?

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That's a job for an automounter. Last time I used one on Linux, they kind of sucked, but I think they've improved in the last decade. –  Gilles Sep 5 '12 at 22:25
@Gilles Thanks for pointing it out, I'll try and find one for this –  Tobias Kienzler Sep 6 '12 at 6:04
Can truecrypt be mounted with the mount command? –  Nils Sep 6 '12 at 21:24
Could you perhaps use something similar to @ultrasawblade's script and leverage lsof (or possibly /proc/*/fd or somesuch; lsof gets its data from somewhere...)? It wouldn't be perfect (very fast accesses would go uncaught, and it would cause a bit of CPU hammering), but I'm guessing it's either something like that, or access notifies (which at the very least means write a system application, not a script). –  Michael Kjörling Jan 4 '13 at 12:40

1 Answer 1

Truecrypt can't do this but something like the following would accomplish what you are trying to do:


cd /
echo "$0: Proceeding with dismount in 5 minutes." > /dev/console
# or something else to notify user that the volume will be unmounted
sleep 4.5m
echo "$0: Proceeding with dismount in 30 seconds." > /dev/console
sleep 30s
sync; truecrypt $@

The cd / would be to ensure that the current directory is never within the mounted truecrypt volume, just in case you invoked it under different circumstances.

Save this somewhere, chmod +x it, and call it something like truecrypt-auto-dismount, and then

truecrypt {mount-options}; truecrypt-auto-dismount {dismount-options}

I would definitely incorporate some type of notification so you have a chance to close open files. Of course you could get rather elaborate and try to incorporate a loop that kills with SIGTERM (and then does SIGKILL if it doesn't respond in a timeframe) all processes listed by lsof | grep /mnt/your-truecrypt-volume if you wanted.

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Thanks, that's a general timeout, but I'm looking for a possiblity to have the timer reset whenever the mounted dir is accessed again. And truecrypt.org/docs/?s=background-task suggest that this is possible when using the GUI (which I can't) –  Tobias Kienzler Sep 5 '12 at 14:39

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