Determining the filesystem for storage media
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parted
As with the graphical tools Kvpm [3] and GParted [4], parted proves to be information friendly. parted delivers detailed information about partitions with the -l (--list ) option. Listing 4 shows the excerpt from the last line of Figure 3. In the fifth column of the output, you will see the filesystem, which in this figure is ext4. GParted delivers similarly large amounts of information but much more elegantly and in graphical format (Figure 5).
Listing 4
parted output
Model: Linux device-mapper (linear) (dm) Disk /dev/mapper/fehmarn--vg-home: 227GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: loop Disk Flags: Number Start End Size File system Flags 1 0,00B 227GB 227GB ext4
Figure 5: If necessary, GParted can deliver extensive details about the mounted filesystem.
file
Occasionally, the file command also comes in handy. This command yields information about a given entry in a filesystem. By default, it ignores unusual entries like "special files." However, file is able to read these entries with the help of the -s (--special-files ) option. Listing 5 shows the call for the fifth partition on the first hard drive. The call correctly finds an encrypted filesystem (LUKS) on the drive.
Listing 5
Using file
# file -s /dev/sda5 /dev/sda5: LUKS encrypted file, ver 1 [aes, xts-plain64, sha1] UUID: 305a1a1b-797a-4634-9acd-49c1f530978b
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