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I have a Likebook Mars e-reader. When I plug it into my laptop with a USB cable, it appears in PCManFM-Qt, and I can access the files on it graphically from there:

A screenshot of PCManFM-Qt with "Likebook T80D" in the sidebar

That works okay. What I want to do is browse, read, and write files on the command line with cd, ls, cp, etc. But the e-reader doesn't seem to be reachable via anywhere I can cd to in the real filesystem (even if I've already looked at some of the files in PCManFM-Qt, which in other cases seems to be necessary). Having looked at the question How to access a usb flash drive from the terminal?, I tried lsblk, but the e-reader doesn't seem to be listed:

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
nvme0n1     259:0    0 953.9G  0 disk 
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0   300M  0 part /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2    0 653.6G  0 part /
├─nvme0n1p3 259:3    0    16M  0 part 
└─nvme0n1p4 259:4    0   300G  0 part /media/hippo/A4A60CCCA60CA142

df provides no hints, either:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs           1.6G  1.9M  1.6G   1% /run
/dev/nvme0n1p2  643G  240G  371G  40% /
tmpfs           7.6G     0  7.6G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
/dev/nvme0n1p1  300M   33M  267M  11% /boot/efi
tmpfs           1.6G   92K  1.6G   1% /run/user/1000
/dev/nvme0n1p4  300G  154G  147G  52% /media/hippo/A4A60CCCA60CA142
guiverc
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Kodiologist
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  • Are there any mounts under /run/user/<your_UID>/? For example, /run/user/1000/gvfs is where Nautilus puts mounts for my user. – user535733 Jan 04 '23 at 19:26
  • @user535733 Bingo. Looks like it shows up as /run/user/1000/gvfs/mtp:host=Boyue_Likebook-T80D_CNBT80D20200601412. Thanks. – Kodiologist Jan 04 '23 at 19:31
  • @guiverc Yes, the PCManFM in question is PCManFM-Qt. I don't think the old version is often used these days. – Kodiologist Jan 05 '23 at 18:29
  • pcmanfm is a different program (https://packages.ubuntu.com/kinetic/pcmanfm) to pcmanfm-qt used by LXQt/Lubuntu (https://packages.ubuntu.com/kinetic/pcmanfm-qt). Yes the GTK2 program is used a lot (server users with LXDE added commonly), but not by Lubuntu. They are not the same application. Lubuntu doesn't use deprecated GTK2 apps. – guiverc Jan 05 '23 at 21:42
  • I see, I'd thought that "PCManFM" would be unambiguous by this point. I've edited the question text. – Kodiologist Jan 06 '23 at 13:26

1 Answers1

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As hinted in the comments by user535733, plugging in the e-reader creates a directory in /run/user/`id -u`/gvfs for the e-reader's filesystem. The name of the new directory (mtp:host=Boyue_Likebook-T80D_CNBT80D20200601412 in my case) seems to be consistent for a given device, even after the host machine reboots.

The underlying protocol here seems to be Media Transfer Protocol (MTP), as opposed to the more familiar USB mass storage.

Kodiologist
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  • MTP was the same headache I had with my Kindle Paperwhite; Did you find a software solution to browse, read, and write files? – BaTycoon Jan 06 '23 at 14:14
  • @BaTycoon I'm not sure I understand your question. My answer here describes how to find a directory that corresponds to the device filesystem. You can then use whatever file manager you like with it. – Kodiologist Jan 06 '23 at 18:48