Determining a File System type (updated)

Published 17 Jun 2011 Read time 3 min(s) 19 sec(s) (2495 views). Solaris

As a seasoned data storage engineer I've dealt with many a file system type across many an operating system. But even to this day I still get a query from sys admins and engineers alike asking how to determine what type of file system is this disk or partition.

Under Solaris my favourite has always been the one and only fstyp command. Under various flavours of Linux I've encountered df -T and blkid are the most common. If all else fails and the file system is mounted, simply parsing the output from mount will reveal all.

The remainder of this article show a series of output from various *NIX operating systems as a guideline :-)

Solaris

fstyp Using the fstyp command you can determine a file sytems type (if the disk slice contains a file system).
```
fstyp [-v] <device>
```
For example:
```
# fstyp /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0
zfs
# fstyp /dev/rdsk/c0t0p0
pcfs
# fstyp /dev/rdsk/c2t3d0s7
ufs
```
From the above we notice that the file systems are zfs, pcfs and ufs file sytems associated with various disk slices.

/etc/fstab Any mountable file system will have entries in /etc/vfstab. The fourth field provides the file system type:

# head /etc/vfstab
#device                device                  mount        FS       fsck   mount    mount
#to mount              to fsck                 point        type     pass   at boot  options
#
/dev/dsk/c0t3d0s0      /dev/rdsk/c0t3d0s0      /            ufs      1      no       -
/dev/dsk/c0t3d0s1      -                       -            swap     -      no       -
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s7      /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s7      /export/home ufs      2      yes      -
/dev/dsk/c0t3d0s7      /dev/rdsk/c0t3d0s7      /files1      ufs      2      yes      -
pluto:/export/man      -                       /usr/man     nfs      -      yes      ro,soft
/dev/vx/dsk/fsvol/vol1 /dev/vx/rdsk/fsvol/vol1 /ext         vxfs     1      yes      -

From the above we have ufs, swap, nfs and vxfs type file systems.

AIX

lsvf Running lspv to get a list of disks and volume groups, and then run lsvg -l <vg> will also show the FS type. For example:

# lspv
disk1234        pvg11        active
hdisk234        pvg12        active
# lsvg -l pvg11
pvg11:
LV NAME            TYPE       LPs   PPs   PVs  LV STATE      MOUNT POINT
varcorelv          jfs2       12203 12203 11   open/syncd    /var/core

mount Using the mount command we see the output, for example:

# mount
node   mounted          mounted    vfs  date           options  over
----   -------          ---------  ---  ------------   -------  ---------
       /dev/hd0         /          jfs  Dec 17 08:04   rw, log  =/dev/hd8
       /dev/hd3         /tmp       jfs  Dec 17 08:04   rw, log  =/dev/hd8
       /dev/hd1         /home      jfs  Dec 17 08:06   rw, log  =/dev/hd8
       /dev/hd2         /usr       jfs  Dec 17 08:06   rw, log  =/dev/hd8

Linux

With the many Linux distributions available, come many a tool also, a few examples below

lsblk Using the lsblk command with the -f flag produces the following output

$ sudo lsblk -f

NAME        FSTYPE LABEL      MOUNTPOINT
sda                           
|-sda1      ntfs   OS         
|-sda2      ntfs   Data       
|-sda3                        
|-sda5      ext4              /
|-sda6      swap              [SWAP]

blkid

% sudo blkid
/dev/sda1: UUID="7ae4b6dc-08d0-4a82-b5c4-4b454c8b32ea" TYPE="ext3" PARTUUID="18eb2616-01"
/dev/sdb1: UUID="bbde8017-1893-49d1-b51e-431325c57589" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="1dcbe7ab-01"
/dev/sdb5: UUID="b3c840a0-ee05-4607-a151-bdb038f7a76a" TYPE="swap" PARTUUID="1dcbe7ab-05"
/dev/sdd1: UUID="5C2B729713874C4F" TYPE="ntfs"

df Using df -T also prints the file system types, for example:

$ df -T
Filesystem     Type      1K-blocks       Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1      ext4      190230236  102672812  77894244  57% /
udev           devtmpfs    1021128         12   1021116   1% /dev
tmpfs          tmpfs        412884        816    412068   1% /run
none           tmpfs          5120          0      5120   0% /run/lock
none           tmpfs       1032208       2584   1029624   1% /run/shm
cgroup         tmpfs       1032208          0   1032208   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sdb1      fuseblk  1953480700 1141530424 811950276  59% /library

fdisk Or simply use fdisk -l, but whilst it shows the generic file system family type it doesn't provide the exact FS type associated with the partition. For example:

$ sudo fdisk -l | grep "^/"
/dev/sda1  *     2048 976773167 976771120 465.8G 83 Linux
/dev/sdb1  *     2048 619126783 619124736 295.2G 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2   619128830 625141759   6012930   2.9G  5 Extended
/dev/sdb5   619128832 625141759   6012928   2.9G 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdd1         256 732566644 732566389   2.7T  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sdc1          63 732566643 732566581   2.7T 83 Linux