How To: List Mounted Partitions

Today we’ll have a nice and simple article, simply because we can, about how to list mounted partitions in Linux. Like so many of these articles, we’re going to need an open terminal. On the other hand, we’ll just be exploring a couple of tools to help us along the way.

Your disk drives, be they solid state or hard disk drives, will be separated into partitions. It can get confusing until you realize that the outputs from these commands won’t always just represent what I’ll call physical partitions. Sometimes, there are virtual partitions – sometimes with their fun file systems.

You may have everything from mounted temporary partitions to software designed to run in its own mounted partition space. When you run these bellow commands, you’ll learn that there are all sorts of mounted partitions. This is completely normal. It’s also pretty easy to weed out the physical partitions.

Why would you want to do this? Well, I’m having a goofy error when I boot one of my computers and I need to narrow it down to which disk it is that’s giving me the error. Once I take the time to do that, I can move on to troubleshooting the problem and finding a solution for the problem.

The tools we’ll be using are ‘findmnt’ and ‘df’. They’re described as the following:

finding:

findmnt – find a filesystem

df:

df – report file system disk space usage

As you can see from the description, both of those have something to do with getting information about a file system. That makes them good tools for the job.

NOTE: There are multiple ways to list mounted partitions. You have GUI and CLI-based tools available to you. One of the goals surrounding this whole project is not just to make people more familiar with Linux but also to help them get comfortable working within the terminal. You’ll be just fine!

List Mounted Partitions:

As I mentioned above, we’ll be using a terminal for this. I do not mind which terminal you’re using but you can usually open the default terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T. That works most of the time.

With your terminal now open, you can try the following command:

The output from that command will list your mounted partitions. It’s a lot of text, but most folks are probably only interested in the start of the line. The output of the findmnt command may look a little something like this:

The next command you’re going to want to try will be the ‘df’ command. We’ll be using a few flags. It’s not very complicated, though it may look like it. The command is a simple ‘df’ command and looks like this:

We use the -a flag for ‘all’. Then we use the -T flag because that means type. Finally, we use the -h flag because that means the output will be “human readable” (or more easily read by us mortals.) The output of which looks something like this:

No matter which of those commands you use, it will make your terminal list mounted partitions. If you need to know which partitions are mounted, these are the tools you can start with. They’re easy enough to work with.

Closure:

Well, it’s a bit late in the evening. I almost forgot that there was an article due tomorrow. This happens when I get a lot of responses (elsewhere) on the wrong day. My brain just doesn’t click. I should probably set an automated notification to let me know which days require articles, but I haven’t failed yet. In fact, you get an interesting article about how you can list mounted partitions.

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