Copyright 2000 Andreas Dilger (adilger@turbolinux.com)

This man page was created for blkid from e2fsprogs-1.25.

This file may be copied under the terms of the GNU Public License.

Based on uuidgen, Mon Sep 17 10:42:12 2000, Andreas Dilger
blkid - command-line utility to locate/print block device attributes blkid [ -hv ] [ [ -c cachefile ] -w writecachefile ] [ -o format ] [ -s tag ] [ -t NAME = value ] [ device ... ] The blkid program is the command-line interface to working with libuuid (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.

-c 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.

-h Display a usage message and exit.

-o Display blkid 's output using the specified format. The format parameter may be full , (the default), value , (only print the value of any tags printed by blkid) or device (only print the device name).

-s Show only the tags for each (specified) device 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 Search the blkid cache (plus any devices specifed on the command line) for all 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 .

-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.

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. blkid was written by Andreas Dilger for libblkid. blkid is part the e2fsprogs package since version 1.26 and is available from http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net. libblkid (3)