Thursday, November 20, 2003

How can I quickly tell what file systems my current kernel can Handle ?

How can I quickly tell what file systems my current kernel can Handle ?

The kernel provides a list of file system types it is able to mount via the /proc file system. To view the list, run the command cat /proc/filesystems. The output will look something like:

nodev    proc
ext3
ext2
vfat
iso9660
nodev nfs
nodev smbfs

In this output, the entry vfat means you can mount FAT/VFAT (Microsoft Windows) partitions. The entries ending with smbfs and nfs mean you can interact with file servers that use SMBFS (Microsoft's Server Message Block File System, accessed via Samba) or NFS (Sun's Network File System). The iso9660 indicates that you can mount standard CD-ROM file systems, and ext3 and ext2 indicate that you can mount those kinds of Linux file systems.

In the first column, nodev indicates that the file system is not associated with a physical device, like the /proc file system itself, which has information about state of the running kernel.