This recipe installs and applies pmount, a command that mounts USB disks attached directly to the Raspberry Pi in the same manner as the desktop file manager.

If a disk is connected to the Raspberry Pi via a USB port when using the Raspberry Pi's graphical user interface (GUI), the desktop file manager will ask the user's permission to mount the disk. However, when using a Raspberry Pi remotely (or when the Raspberry Pi has been booted in text mode), there is no GUI to ask if a file should be mounted.

This recipe does not rely on the Raspberry Pi GUI or the desktop file manager to mount a disk. Instead, the command-line utility pmount is used to mount a USB drive in the same way that the GUI would—in the /media directory.

Once you've completed this recipe, you will be able to use both large USB storage devices and small USB flash drives to exchange files with other computers without relying on the Raspberry Pi graphical user interface or the desktop file manager...