Play with "cdrom" in Linux

Linux comand shell "bash" is powerful as we know. Here is a fun with bash. You can control your cdrom using 'eject command'. Here is only a simple description. For nore details, you should look at it's man pages.

This is not a project or something serious. just for fun. You can control your cdrom by using this code. This will only work on Linux platform. I did it in fedora core 9. But it will work other disro's also.

!!!!!!!WARNING!!!!!!!!
1)Some procedure described in this article is not a recommended or the hardware devices are intended to work like it. Do it in your own risk.
2)Don't interrupt the way the hardware working (the movement of CD ROM tray by your hand).

Open your 'cdrom' tray under software control
Try this command

$eject cdrom

It will try to open your cdrom tray. if you have two or more cdrom drives, try

$eject cdrom0

If you havn't any cdrom device, bash will return an error message:

$eject cdrom2
eject: unable to find or open device for: `cdrom2'

You can find your device name ( "cdrom0', 'cdrom1' etc.) from "/media"

Close your 'cdrom' tray under software control
Try this command

$eject -t cdrom

Other useful parameters are there in 'eject'. You can read about it:

$man eject

Writing a bash script
Just entering the command at a time is not convenient. You can write some commands together and execute it when you want.
Open a new file using gedit editor (or any other you want)

$gedit cdromplay

A winow will appear and type what you want. For example, if you want to open and close your cdrom continously three times just print like this:

eject cdrom
eject -t cdrom
eject cdrom
eject -t cdrom
eject cdrom
eject -t cdrom

save it and close.
Then to resolve permission,

$chmode +x cdromplay

Then execute cdromplay

./cdromplay

You can see what I said before.

Do it in your real applications
As you know, we did some rubbish things before. There is no need to do so. But this is useful in some applications like CDburner - It will automatically eject tray after writing a CD ROM or you can control convineiently in a CD ROM player. We can use python to do a GUI application.

# File: cdromplay.py

import os
from Tkinter import *

class App:

def __init__(self, master):

frame = Frame(master)
frame.pack()
self.button = Button(frame, text="Quit", command=frame.quit)
self.button.pack(side=LEFT)

self.hi_there = Button(frame, text="Eject", command=self.say_hi)
self.hi_there.pack(side=LEFT)

def say_hi(self):
os.system("eject cdrom1 -T")
print "boss, cdrom activated"

root = Tk()

app = App(root)

root.mainloop()

As you can see, the above program is the altered version of "Hello World!" program of one famous python tutorial. Don't get upset or confused by the defnition names. The confusion in program code will not affect the real program.Copy and save it or download it from here. You require python to do this. 'cd' to the appropriate directory and run,

$python cdromplay.py

Now you will see a simple widget with a button.


Press button and observe what's happen.



Download cdromplay for python
Download cdromplay bashscript

Watch the video how cdrom is ejected:

Good Luck!