[PLUG] How to tell where you're putting stuff

[John Jason Jordan]

This problem has vexed me off and on for as long as I've used Linux.

I mount a removable drive at a folder in my root drive. I copy files to
it. I umount the drive and unplug it. Later, with the removable drive
not even plugged in I look at the folder where I mounted it, and there
are all the files that I thought I was copying to the removable drive.

That happened once more just now, and the strange thing is that all of
the files are also on the removable drive, verified by plugging it into
a different computer.

At the same time, looking at the folder in the terminal, there are
eight files, and a folder containing another 15 files. I tried to rm
one of the files and I get 'input.output error.' Then I discovered that
I get the same error on all of them. I tried 'sudo rm' but I still get
the input/output error. The removable drive has been in my pocket for a
couple hours. The folder containing these messed up files is in
/media/jjj, in which several other drives are mounted and running
without a problem. Is there a super-root command that means 'remove
this file and I don't mean maybe.'

The 'files' appear to be echoes of the real files that are in my
pocket. How can I nuke them from the folder? Oh, and the USB drive that
was mounted there was formatted exFAT.

And another question is, might the file and mounting problems be
related to my problems with grub-pc? But note that the grub-pc issues
have been with me for months, and I never had a filesystem problem, but
then all my filesystems were all ext4 until a couple weeks ago when I
started using exFAT. Should I just conclude that exFAT on Linux is just
not ready for primed time?

There must be some rule about how to mount things that I never learned.