Get UUID of Hard Disks [Update]

Short Tip: Get UUID of Hard Disks [Update]

shell.png
There is an update to this post available: UUIDs and Linux: Everything you ever need to know.

The Universally Unique Identifier can be used to identify a device independent form its mount point or device name. This is more and more important as many devices today support hot-plugging or are external anyway. Therefore it makes sometimes sense to access a device (for example in fstab) not by device name but by the UUID.

There are several ways to get the UUID. The first one uses the /dev/ directory. While you are on is you might want to check other by-* directories, I never knew of them.

1
2
$ ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 11. Okt 18:02 53cdad3b-4b01-4a6c-a099-be1cdf1acf6d -> ../../sda2

Another way to get the uuid by usage of the tool blkid:

1
2
$ blkid /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1: LABEL="/" UUID="ee7cf0a0-1922-401b-a1ae-6ec9261484c0" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"

There you also get the label and other information. Quite usefule.

Btw., if you wonder how “unique” this unique is, here a quote from Wikipedia:

1 trillion UUIDs would have to be created every nanosecond for 10 billion years to exhaust the number of UUIDs.

Pretty unique.

Thanks to Linux By Examples for the initial howto.

0 (0)
Article Rating (No Votes)
Rate this article
Attachments
There are no attachments for this article.
Comments
There are no comments for this article. Be the first to post a comment.
Full Name
Email Address
Security Code Security Code
Related Articles RSS Feed
python learning
Viewed 2040 times since Wed, Dec 18, 2019
SSH: Execute Remote Command or Script – Linux
Viewed 2554 times since Mon, Feb 18, 2019
Oracle Linux 7 – How to audit changes to a trusted file such as /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow
Viewed 3104 times since Wed, Jul 25, 2018
Linux How to reset a root password on Fedora
Viewed 2734 times since Sun, Dec 6, 2020
Using grep to find string in files
Viewed 2390 times since Fri, May 15, 2020
LVM: Extend an existing Volume Group by adding a new disk
Viewed 2192 times since Sat, Jun 2, 2018
8 Vim Tips And Tricks That Will Make You A Pro User
Viewed 3075 times since Fri, Apr 19, 2019
How to maximise SSD performance with Linux
Viewed 8796 times since Fri, May 15, 2020
How To: Linux Hard Disk Encryption With LUKS [ cryptsetup Command ]
Viewed 7467 times since Fri, Jul 13, 2018
10 Linux nslookup Command Examples for DNS Lookup
Viewed 10370 times since Sun, Sep 30, 2018