Unmounting several partitions at once

Question

I have this portable hard disk with 4 partitions. When I need to safely remove the device I have to unmount each partition manually. Is there a way I can unmount all at once? Or is it suffice to unmount one partition only and remove the disk?

Answer 1

If you know the device file, say /dev/sdb, you can unmount all partitions of the device with the command: sudo umount /dev/sdb?*

The command sudo umount -a should be avoided, because it would unmount also partitions you do not want to unmount at that moment.

By the way, I think that the gnome right click menu item "Safely remove" is the graphical best way to operate.

Answer 2

The command sudo umount -a will unmount them all.