NAME

blkid - command-line utility to locate/print block device attributes

SYNOPSIS

blkid [ -ghlLv ] [ [ -c cachefile ] -w writecachefile ] [ -o format ] [ -s tag ] [ -t NAME=value ] [ device ... ]

DESCRIPTION

The blkid program is the command-line interface to working with libblkid(3) library. 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).

blkid 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.

OPTIONS

-c cachefile: Read from cachefile instead of reading from the default cache file /etc/blkid.tab. If you want to start with a clean cache (i.e. don't report devices previously scanned but not necessarily available at this time), specify /dev/null.

-g: Perform a garbage collection pass on the blkid cache to remove devices which no longer exist.

-h: Display a usage message and exit.

-l: Look up one device that matches the search parameter specified using the -t option. If there are multiple devices that match the specified search parameter, then the device with the highest priority is returned, and/or the first device found at a given priority. Device types in order of decreasing priority are Device Mapper, EVMS, LVM, MD, and finally regular block devices. If this option is not specified, blkid will print all of the devices that match the search parameter.

-o format: Display blkid's output using the specified format. The format parameter may be full (the default), value (only print the value of the tags), list (print the devices in a user-friendly format), or device (only print the device name).

-L: Print the devices in a user-friendly list format. This is the equivalent of using the option -o list.

-s tag: For each (specified) device, show only the tags that match tag. It is possible to specify multiple -s options. If no tag is specified, then all tokens are shown for all (specified) devices. In order to just refresh the cache without showing any tokens, use -s none with no other options.

-t NAME=value: Search for block devices with tokens named NAME that have the value value, and display any devices which are found. Common values for NAME include TYPE, LABEL, and UUID. If there are no devices specified on the command line, all block devices will be searched; otherwise only the specified devices are searched.

-v: Display version number and exit.

-w writecachefile: Write the device cache to writecachefile instead of writing it to the default cache file /etc/blkid.tab. If you don't want to save the cache to the default file, specify /dev/null. If not specified it will be the same file as that given by the -c option.

device: Display tokens from only the specified device. It is possible to give multiple device options on the command line. If none is given, all devices which appear in /proc/partitions are shown, if they are recognized.

RETURN CODE

If the specified token was found, or if any tags were shown from (specified) devices, 0 is returned. If the specified token was not found, or no (specified) devices could be identified, an exit code of 2 is returned. For usage or other errors, an exit code of 4 is returned.

AUTHOR

blkid was written by Andreas Dilger for libblkid.

AVAILABILITY

blkid is part the e2fsprogs package since version 1.26 and is available from http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net.