How do I Get a Device's UUID in Shell Script?

**Penguin Guy** · May 2nd, 2010

How do I automatically get the UUID of a device from the device name? I've been trying to get it through blkid and sed, but this is as far as I've got:

Code:

$ blkid /dev/sdb1 | sed 's_[^#]*UUID="\([-[:alnum:]]*\)"_\1_'
B6BF-00BD TYPE="vfat"

Any help would be greatly appreciated. More info here.

Solution:

Code:

blkid -o value -s UUID /dev/sdb1

You can also replace UUID with LABEL to get the label of a device.

**slavik** · May 2nd, 2010

Originally Posted by Penguin Guy

How do I automatically get the UUID of a device from the device name? I've been trying to get it through blkid and sed, but this is as far as I've got:

Code:

$ blkid /dev/sdb1 | sed 's_[^#]*UUID="\([-[:alnum:]]*\)"_\1_'
B6BF-00BD TYPE="vfat"

Any help would be greatly appreciated. More info here.

Code:

sudo blkid /dev/sdb1 | perl -pe 's/.*UUID="(.*?)".*/$1/'

**Bachstelze** · May 2nd, 2010

Or

Code:

sudo blkid /dev/sdb1 | cut -d '"' -f 2

**Penguin Guy** · May 2nd, 2010

Originally Posted by Bachstelze

Or

Code:

sudo blkid /dev/sdb1 | cut -d '"' -f 2

I'm afraid that doesn't work for all devices, since the list of properties is not always in the same order.

Originally Posted by slavik

Code:

sudo blkid /dev/sdb1 | perl -pe 's/.*UUID="(.*?)".*/$1/'

Thanks, that works great!

**Penguin Guy** · May 3rd, 2010

Hey, looks like I found a better solution in fstab itself:

Code:

blkid -o value -s UUID /dev/sdb1

Sorry for bothering you.

**rnerwein** · May 3rd, 2010

Originally Posted by Penguin Guy

Hey, looks like I found a better solution in fstab itself:

Code:

blkid -o value -s UUID /dev/sdb1

Sorry for bothering you.

hi
i propose, if you are running blkid in a script, to use the "-c" option. this causes the command to read
from a clean cache ( not /etc/blkid.tab --> /dev/.blkid.tab - those files may be previously but no more
available ( e.g. removeable

).
use: blkid -c /dev/null /dev/xyzn

ciao