Changing current directory to shared filesytem using linux terminal

Question

I have a shared filesystem (E: in my installation of Windows 7) in which I keep my programming codes. I want to shift from Windows to Ubuntu for programming mainly because I like the linux terminal compared to alternative in Windows.

I asked this question after which I came to know that my shared filesystem is /dev/sda5. I tried to use terminal to cd to this directory but I wasn't able to do so.

I have the shared filesystem loaded and I was in /dev when I tried to change to sda5. The error was

bash: cd: sda5: Not a directory

How can I do that?

Solution

You need to make it mounted in somewhere. The device is there but you have no access to it to achieve this you must use the mount command. First create a mounting point as:

sudo mkdir /mnt/shared

Then you can mount the sda5 to it:

sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sda5 /mnt/shared

Now, your files should be in /mnt/shared:

cd /mnt/shared

I don't encourage you to do so cause it can harm files having different end line encodings in windows / linux. What I suggest you is to create another partition and move the files you want to use on both systems there. Then stick with a multi OS IDE.

Comments

[Aseem Bansal]

Can I mount only a particular folder from the drive there? The reason I cannot keep it in Ubuntu is because it is installed inside Windows and my computer doesn't have good enough configuration to have 2 separate OS.

[vfbsilva]

@AseemBansal Sure you can all you have to do is specify the whole path of the directory i.e: sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sda5/blah /mnt/shared Where blah is the specific folder you want to mount. . Notice that mount does not use twice as much space in the disk as you mentioned cause all the command do it to enable the files in disk to access from the OS.

[Aseem Bansal]

So the only things I have in the directory are simple .C files, git files and simple windows folders then that wouldn't mess up line encodings. Correct or that can mess up things even in this case like you said?

[vfbsilva]

@AseemBansal line ends can be messed up in text files. As I've mentioned if you are consistent with the IDE you are using in both systems it will not be a problem.