How To: Find The File System Type

Today’s article will be an article that is fairly simple and easy enough for almost anyone, as we discuss how to find the file system type. We’ll discuss a few ways to find this information and we’ll be doing so in the terminal. If that’s something you’re interested in learning, this just might be the article for you!

Before you installed Linux, you formatted the disks. You chose (or didn’t bother choosing) which file system you wanted to go with. There are numerous options, each with its own set of features. Among the choices are file systems like ext4, Btrfs, ZFS, and more!

Here’s a giant list of file system types.

You use file systems on every bit of storage media, even if it’s done behind the scene and not something you manually interact with. If you’re using a thumb drive, it’s formatted with a file system type. This is true even with an SD card, external hard drive, solid-state drive, and all the rest. It’s required for storing and organizing data.

Well, rather than make this a longer article, we can just cut to the chase…

Find The File System Type:

As I mentioned in the intro, we’re going to be using the terminal to find the file system type. So, you’ll need an open terminal. Usually, you can just press CTRL + ALT + T to open the default terminal.

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

df -Th

The output of that would look similar to this:

$ df -Th
df: /run/user/1000/doc: Operation not permitted
Filesystem     Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev           devtmpfs  7.7G     0  7.7G   0% /dev
tmpfs          tmpfs     1.6G   28M  1.6G   2% /run
/dev/sda5      ext4      468G  321G  124G  73% /
tmpfs          tmpfs     7.8G  402M  7.4G   6% /dev/shm
tmpfs          tmpfs     5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs          tmpfs     7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs          tmpfs     1.6G   60K  1.6G   1% /run/user/1000
/dev/sdc1      vfat       15G   14G  929M  94% /media/kgiii/FLASH DRIVE
/dev/sdb4      ext4      761G  566G  157G  79% /media/kgiii/elements4
/dev/sdb3      ext4      961G  626G  286G  69% /media/kgiii/elements3
/dev/sdb2      ext4      969G  401G  519G  44% /media/kgiii/elements2
/dev/sdb1      ext4      975G  904G   21G  98% /media/kgiii/elements1

If you look, you’ll see one of the columns is helpfully labeled ‘type’ and that’s the file system type. If you just care about the first two columns, you could run something like this:

df -Th | awk '{print $1, $2}'

You can also use the ‘lsblk’ command to find the file system type. This might be the command most folks are more familiar with and the command you’d want to run would be this:

lsblk -f

The output of the command would look similar to this:

$ lsblk -f
NAME   FSTYPE LABEL       UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINT
sda                                                                           
├─sda1                                                                        
├─sda2                                                                        
└─sda5 ext4               5015896d-5947-4658-96b0-80efbfae4577  123.4G    69% /
sdb                                                                           
├─sdb1 ext4   elements1   46891b6c-4d86-48f8-b375-4729b2093d82   20.9G    93% /media/kgiii/elements1
├─sdb2 ext4   elements2   349b1b6e-7748-4e86-b358-2e27ca7bd998  518.5G    41% /media/kgiii/elements2
├─sdb3 ext4   elements3   f01814cd-6e7b-4f1d-82a6-22023afd9349  285.9G    65% /media/kgiii/elements3
└─sdb4 ext4   elements4   2f9fe4b2-bdb1-4fdd-af58-c552a4638486  156.6G    74% /media/kgiii/elements4
sdc                                                                           
└─sdc1 vfat   FLASH DRIVE 9E17-623A                             928.7M    94% /media/kgiii/FLASH DRIVE
sr0                                                                           

Again, the second column is helpfully labeled as “FSTYPE” which stands for ‘file system type’ – which is exactly the information we’re after and exactly the information mentioned in the article’s headline.

See? Pretty neat! You can easily find the system type with just a couple of commands. There are other ways, but these are a couple of quick and easy ways. If you don’t know the file system type, perhaps because you’re new and didn’t pay much attention during OS installation, you can now do so.

Closure:

Well, it’s another article. It’s probably not the most interesting of articles, but not all articles are going to be that interesting. Today we cover file system types and how to find them, who knows what the next article will be? One thing you can be reasonably certain of is that there will be another article in just a couple of days. If this one didn’t interest you much, the next one might be right up your alley!

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