How do I find which disk/partition current directory is on?

Question

I can print current directory using pwd, but this gives me the path I navigated to get to where I am. I need to know which disk/partition current directory is on.

For example, if I create symlink user@pc:~$ ln -s /media/HD1 hard_disk and then navigate to ~/hard_disk and run pwd it will print /home/user/hard_disk.

I would like to get the actual path I'm currently on or better just the actual filesystem I'm currently on, which corresponds to one in df.

What should the output be for a filesystem that does not live on a partition? What should the output be for a union filesystem that is the union of multiple different filesystems that may live on different partitions (or no partitions at all)? — Jörg W Mittag, Apr 02 '19 at 13:55
Possible duplicate of Determine what device a directory is located on or How do I find on which physical device a folder is located? etc... plenty of duplicates but nobody wants to search. Nobody. — don_crissti, Apr 02 '19 at 14:16
@don_crissti The duplicate answers do not mention pwd -P, but ok. — Kusalananda, Apr 02 '19 at 16:02

Kusalananda · Accepted Answer · 2019-04-02T11:34:09.853

pwd -P will give you the physical directory you are in, i.e. the pathname of the current working directory with the symbolic links resolved.

Using df . would give you the df output for whatever partition the current directory is residing on.

Example (on an OpenBSD machine):

$ pwd
/usr/ports

$ pwd -P
/extra/ports

$ df .
Filesystem  512-blocks      Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/sd3a    103196440  55987080  42049540    57%    /extra

To parse out the mountpoint from this output, you may use something like

$ df -P . | sed -n '$s/[^%]*%[[:blank:]]*//p'
/extra

To parse out the filesystem device used, use

$ df -P . | sed -n '$s/[[:blank:]].*//p'
/dev/sd3a

I believe some Linux systems also supports

findmnt --target .

(where --target . can be replaced by -T .) or, for more terse output,

findmnt --output target --noheadings --target .

(where --noheadings may be replaced by -n, and --output target may be replaced by -o target) to get the mountpoint holding the filesystem that the current directory is located on.

Use --output source to get the mounted device node.

"To parse out the filesystem device used, use" ...unless you're on a system that uses ZFS, at which point that will print the ZFS file system name. So you'd get something like tank/data/whatever/someplace back, where tank is the pool name. (At that point you could map it back to a pool, and from there to a set of candidate disks, but I'm pretty sure there's no direct way to map it back to "a" disk.) — user, Apr 02 '19 at 12:46

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 02 '19 at 11:12

1

As said by Ignacio here, you can use df -P file/goes/here | tail -1 | cut -d' ' -f 1.

answered Apr 02 '19 at 11:12

The Coding Penguin

342

How do I find which disk/partition current directory is on?

2 Answers2