How to “Un-Mount” (umount) a Remote SSHFS Drive on Mac OS 10.9

In my post, SSH functionality with RackSpace Cloud Sites we explore mounting a remote server using sshfs.

It is common to have issues with the connection fall asleep and then not being able to un-mount the drive and subsequently not being able to re-mount the drive.

After much searching I found the following solution for Mac OS 10.9.

Try the following:

umount -f <absolute pathname to the mount point>

If that does not work then try:

sudo umount -f /Users//Documents/mounted_dir 

NOTE: The command is umount NOT unmount. I killed about and hour before I figured THAT out.

If you still have trouble, you can kill the process and try again.

1) Find the culprit sshfs process:

$ pgrep -lf sshfs

2) Kill it:

$ kill -9 <pid_of_sshfs_process>

3) sudo force unmount the “unavailable” directory:

$ sudo umount -f <mounted_dir>

3) Unmount the culprit directory:

sudo umount -f /Users//Documents/mounted_dir 

One thought on “How to “Un-Mount” (umount) a Remote SSHFS Drive on Mac OS 10.9


  1. […] Working with RackSpace Clouds Sites has its advantages. One drawback though, is the lack of SSH access to you sites. This makes the routine advantages of SSH inaccessible. There is a work-around though. Enter sshfs. SSHFS is a way to mount a file system over SSH. The client interacts with the remote file system via the SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) Once mounted you can use ssfs for the following: How to “Un-Mount” (umount) a Remote SSHFS Drive on Mac OS 10.9 […]

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