Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 20 Aug 2004 23:58:58 +0200 | From | Andries Brouwer <> | Subject | Re: how to identify filesystem type |
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On Fri, Aug 20, 2004 at 02:46:56PM -0600, Andreas Dilger wrote:
> There is a tool available as part of e2fsprogs (1.34 maybe?) which is > called "blkid" that identifies block devices. Currently fsck uses this > to know what fsck.fstype to use, and it was my hope to have mount(8) > use this also (never got around to doing that work). > > The benefits of blkid are that you can use it as a regular user, even > without read access to the disk (it will return cached values generated > by root if you don't have read access to the block device), it also will > print LABEL and UUID information to identify the filesystem, if you use > it repeatedly from some application it doesn't re-scan all of the devices > each time (important for large numbers of block devices).
I suppose this code started as part of mount(8). For example,
# mount --guess-fstype /dev/hdb2 reiserfs
However, I cannot stress often enough that these are unreliable guesses. It is really undesirable when standard infrastructure starts depending on 99.7% guesses.
Consequently, "blkid" is a really bad name. It gives no indication of the guessed nature of its results.
(I see that my current version is also broken: # blkid -v blkid 1.0.0 (12-Feb-2003) # blkid ... /dev/sda4: LABEL="ZIP-100" UUID="34D8-1C07" TYPE="msdos" /dev/sda1: UUID="1ac5969c-8fdf-4f69-934a-c6103d93c05d" TYPE="ext2" /dev/sdb4: LABEL="ZIP-100" UUID="34D8-1C07" TYPE="msdos" /dev/sdb1: LABEL="CF_CARD032M" UUID="2001-1207" TYPE="msdos" ... Here no /dev/sda1 and no /dev/sdb4 exist.)
Andries
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