but if it's in the foreground and CTRL-C doesn't stop it, then what?
then you must pull the plug... look at this thread for details

I had to yank the plug once, sweating bullets because I had the drives rw
As long as there hasn't been any recent writing on disk, you're pretty safe. Use emplode to synchronize and it will mark the disk as OK again.
I've rebooted a lot of times when mounted rw, without any problems (yet)...

Also, any idea why I got the error from blit?
I assume you use blitoutput, which uses the front-panel buttons to scroll through the text, so it is trying to access /dev/ir, which is used by ir_dump.
Try blitecho instead:

ir_dump | while read CODE

do

	echo $CODE | blitecho

done

Frank van Gestel