List drives by UUID in Ubuntu

Having used this tip a few times myself, I'd like to share it with you: a very simple way to list all the drives in your Ubuntu system using their UUID's.

Disks by uuid in Ubuntu

Apart from blkid command, there's another relatively easy way for you to confirm what each UUID on your system corresponds to. If you look in the /dev/disk/by-uuid directory, it contains symlinks which look like UUIDs and point to the real devices for each of your disks:

ubuntu# ls -al /dev/disk/by-uuid/*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Jan 12 04:25 /dev/disk/by-uuid/2596b3b4-9e54-47e2-bb45-89b3d4a0e7e3 -> ../../sda2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Jan 12 04:25 /dev/disk/by-uuid/d2ff8a06-74b7-4877-9d37-1873414e25b3 -> ../../sda1

Confirm disk device using its UUID

Knowing the /dev/disk/by-uuid directory, you can easily use this to look disks up by their UUID with the readlink command:

ubuntu# readlink /dev/disk/by-uuid/d2ff8a06-74b7-4877-9d37-1873414e25b3
../../sda1

That's it! Have a great week!

See also:

• lrwxrwxrwx
• Ubuntu UUID howto
• Unix glossary

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