Linux blkid Command to Find Block Devices Details
Today we will show you how to use lsblk and blkid utilities to find out information about block devices and we are using a CentOS 7.0 installed machine.
lsblk is a Linux utility that will display information about all the available block devices on your system. It reads and gathers from them from the sysfs filesystem. The utility will display information about all block devices (with the exception of RAM disks) in a tree-like format by default.
Lsblk default output
By default lsblk will display a tree-like format of the block devices:
NAME
- – the device name
MAJ:MIN
- - Every device on a Linux operating system is represented by a file, for block (disk) devices, they describe the device using major and minor device numbers.
RM
- – removable device – shows 1 if this is a removable device and 0 if it’s not
TYPE
- – the device type
MOUNTPOINT
- - the location where the device is mounted
RO
- – it will display 1 for read-only filesystems and 0 for those that are not read-only
SIZE
- – the size of the device
Display the owner of the devices
To display information about the owenership of the device, the user and group that own the file and the mode that the filesystem has been mounted with you can use the –m option like this:
lsblk –m
List the device blocks
If you wish to just list the devices and not show them as a tree you can use the –l option:
lsblk –l
Use in scripts
Advanced tip: if you wish to use this in a script and don’t want to have the heading displayed you can use the –n flag like so:
lsblk –ln
The blkid program is a command-line utility that displays information about available block devices. It can determine the type of content (e.g. filesystem, swap) a block device holds and also attributes (tokens, NAME=value pairs) from the content metadata (e.g. LABEL or UUID fields). It has two main forms of operation: either searching for a device with a specific NAME=value pair or displaying NAME=value pairs for one or more devices.
blkid usage
Simply running blkid without any argument will list all the available devices with their Universally Unique Identifier (UUID), the TYPE of the file-system and the LABEL if it's set.
# blkid
Listing devices based on name or UUID
If you wish to have information displayed only for a specific device you can use the device name as an option after blkid to do so:
# blkid /dev/sda1
Also if you know the UUID of a device but don't know the device name and wish to find it out you can use the 0-U option like this:
# blkid -U d3b1dcc2-e3b0-45b0-b703-d6d0d360e524
Detailed information
If you wish to obtain mode detailed information you can use the -p and -o udev option to have it display in a nice format like this:
# blkid -po udev /dev/sda1
Reset cache
Sometimes the device list might not be updated, if you think this is the case you can use the -g option that will perform a garbage collection pass on the blkid cache to remove devices which no longer exist.
# blkid -g
Category: LINUX COMMANDS, LINUX HOWTO