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:

The output of that would look similar to this:

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:

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:

The output of the command would look similar to this:

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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How To: Show Your Hard Drive Specifications In The Terminal

In today’s article, we’re going to explore one way that you can show your hard drive hard drive specifications in the terminal. There’s nothing too challenging in this article, so even new people can follow along.

To be clear, I’m using the phrase ‘hard drive’. In this instance, I’m speaking both of mechanical hard drives (HDD) and solid state drives (SSD). I could probably come up with something better, but we’ll just stick with ‘hard drive’.

You may want to know your hard drive specifications to ensure you got what you paid for. You might also want to know what features it supports – and how long at least one of those features is expected to take. For instance, there’s a secure erase feature on many drives and this takes time. The command we’ll be using may tell you how much time it will take to securely erase the disk.

We’ll be showing the hard drive specifications in the terminal and the biggest tool we’ll be using is ‘hdparm’. It does what it says on the tin and describes itself like:

hdparm – get/set SATA/IDE device parameters

You should find hdparm installed and shouldn’t need to install anything. If you want confirmation that hdparm is installed, run:

You’ll find that there’s a lot to learn about hdparm, but don’t worry about that. You can check the manual if you want:

See also:

Check Disk Speed In The Terminal

So then, let’s just jump into the article…

Show Your Hard Drive Specifications:

As the title suggests, we’ll be using the terminal for this exercise. Open you terminal now. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, let’s find your disk drives with the following command.

Your drive should look something like this:

lsblk output
You’re looking on the left, at the base directory – such as ‘sda’ or ‘sdb’.

At this point, you want to note the base – the parent disk drive. In the above image, you see two of them. You see both ‘sda’ and ‘sdb’. Your results can be wildly different, but that’s the information you need.

Now it’s time to show the hard drive specifications. To do that, you’ll want to use a command that looks a lot like this:

An example of that command would look like:

The output is pretty verbose and you can learn a great deal about your hard drive specifications by using the hdparm command. As suggested above, don’t be afraid to run man hdparm to learn more because hdparm is a rather robust application..

Closure:

There you have it, you have another article! This time, you’ll have learned a bit about one way to show your hard drive specifications in the Linux terminal. Pretty sweet! So far we’ve been able to maintain that ‘every other day’ schedule.

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Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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