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I am accessing a micontroller that's running linux off the SD card and is connected to my Mac via USB cable, but when I try to access it serially via minicom, it errors out:

minicom: cannot open /dev/disk3: Resource busy

How do you know what application is using this disk? I tried using lsof but not sure if I find something that's using disk3. What am I missing?

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It seems like you have confused some things:

minicom is a program that will allow you to communicate with for example a different computer running Linux over a serial connection.

/dev/disk3 is a device node on your computer that refers to a physical block device (i.e. for example a hard drive or an SSD).

It does not make sense to ask minicom to communicate with an SSD disk. This is why your command fails.

Instead when using minicom you need to use the device node for a serial communications port. For example it could /dev/cu.usbserial or similar depending on the type of serial port you have.

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  • Right, which means I'd need to access the linux shell over UART port which is done through USB-to-TTL serial cable, yes?
    – Jazzy
    Commented Dec 14, 2020 at 17:47
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    You haven't given any details at all about what you want to connect to - so you can't get a definitive answer on that. But yes, minicom can definitely be used to access a Linux shell prompt over a USB to serial connection... However if that will "just work" for you depends entirely on which USB-to-TTL cable you have, which MCU you're using and how it is setup. I.e. it is not usual for MCUs to run Linux, and if they do, they might have something else on the serial connection than a shell, etc...
    – jksoegaard
    Commented Dec 14, 2020 at 22:13

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