The lsblk Linux command is a useful command which lists information about all or the specified block devices. It queries the /sys virtual file system to obtain the information that it displays. The command displays details about all block devices excluding except RAM disks in a tree-like format by default.

lsblk is installed as part of the util-Linux package. The “util-linux” package contains a large variety of low-level system utilities that are necessary for a Linux system to function. Among others, util-linux contains the fdisk configuration tool and the login program.

Verify the lsblk command in CentOS/Redhat

[root@linuxnix ~]# which lsblk
/usr/bin/lsblk
[root@linuxnix ~]# rpm -qf /usr/bin/lsblk
util-linux-2.23.2-33.el7.x86_64
[root@linuxnix ~]# rpm -ql util-linux | grep -w lsblk
/usr/bin/lsblk
/usr/share/bash-completion/completions/lsblk
/usr/share/man/man8/lsblk.8.gz

Verify the lsblk command in Ubuntu/Debian Linux

sahil@linuxnix:~$ ls -l /bin/lsblk
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 77280 May 27 2016 /bin/lsblk
sahil@linuxnix:~$ dpkg -S /bin/lsblk
util-linux: /bin/lsblk
sahil@linuxnix:~$ dpkg-query -L util-linux | grep lsblk
/bin/lsblk
/usr/share/bash-completion/completions/lsblk
/usr/share/man/man8/lsblk.8.gz
sahil@linuxnix:~$

Example 1: Let’s run the lsblk command without any additional options and understand the output:

[sahil@linuxnix:~] $ lsblk
NAME                          MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
loop0                           7:0    0  208M  0 loop
loop1                           7:1    0  456M  0 loop /mnt/rh
sr0                            11:0    1 1024M  0 rom
sda                             8:0    0   60G  0 disk
|-sda1                          8:1    0  512M  0 part /boot
`-sda2                          8:2    0 59.5G  0 part
  |-os_vg-root_lv (dm-0)      253:0    0   16G  0 lvm  /
  |-os_vg-swap_01_lv (dm-1)   253:1    0    4G  0 lvm  [SWAP]
  |-os_vg-tmp_lv (dm-4)       253:4    0    2G  0 lvm  /tmp
  |-os_vg-var_lv (dm-5)       253:5    0   10G  0 lvm  /var
  |-os_vg-hpds_lv (dm-6)      253:6    0    6G  0 lvm  /var/opt/perf/datafiles
  `-os_vg-kickstart_lv (dm-7) 253:7    0    4G  0 lvm  /kickstart
sdd                             8:48   0    2G  0 disk
sdb                             8:16   0   32G  0 disk
`-xfer_vg-lvol1 (dm-3)        253:3    0   32G  0 lvm  /xfer
sdc                             8:32   0   24G  0 disk
`-kdump_vg-kdump_lv (dm-2)    253:2    0   24G  0 lvm
sde                             8:64   0    3G  0 disk

Given below is a description of the fields reported in the lsblk output when used without any options:

NAME: The name of the device.

MAJ: MIN: The major and minor number of the device.

RM: This prints 1 if the device is removable (Eg. Cdrom, USB) or 0 if the device is not removable (Eg. Physical volume).

SIZE: The size of the device in human-readable format.

RO: This field has a value of 1 if the device is in read-only mode and 0 otherwise.

TYPE: Displays whether the device is a loopback device, disk, partition or under LVM control.

MOUNTPOINT: The name of the file system on which the device is mounted.

Explanation of each device in lsblk command output

  • The devices loop0 and loop1 are loopback devices. The output shows that loop1 is mounted on /mnt/rh. This is an iso file made accessible through the /mnt/rh directory.
          df -hTP /mnt/rh
          Filesystem                                 Type     Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
          /xfer/isos/rhel-server-7.4-x86_64-boot.iso iso9660  456M  456M     0 100% /mnt/rh
  • Next, we have the sr0 device which denotes the cdrom. The RM field for this device is 1 indicating that it’s removable.
  • Then we see sda which is a disk device followed by sda1 and sda2 which are partitions.
  • sda1 is mounted as /boot file system, and sda2 partition is under LVM control and resulting from this we can view the slave or child logical volumes are using this physical volume in a tree-like format.
  • Each of the logical volumes being displayed in the output has a file system mounted on them mentioned in the mount point field.

Example 2: If we do not want to view the output in a tree-like format, then we can use the -l option to display the output in a list format:

[sahil@linuxnix:~] $ lsblk -l
NAME                      MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
loop0                       7:0    0  208M  0 loop
loop1                       7:1    0  456M  0 loop /mnt/rh
sr0                        11:0    1 1024M  0 rom
sda                         8:0    0   60G  0 disk
sda1                        8:1    0  512M  0 part /boot
sda2                        8:2    0 59.5G  0 part
os_vg-root_lv (dm-0)      253:0    0   16G  0 lvm  /
os_vg-swap_01_lv (dm-1)   253:1    0    4G  0 lvm  [SWAP]
os_vg-tmp_lv (dm-4)       253:4    0    2G  0 lvm  /tmp
os_vg-var_lv (dm-5)       253:5    0   10G  0 lvm  /var
os_vg-hpds_lv (dm-6)      253:6    0    6G  0 lvm  /var/opt/perf/datafiles
os_vg-kickstart_lv (dm-7) 253:7    0    4G  0 lvm  /kickstart
sdd                         8:48   0    2G  0 disk
sdb                         8:16   0   32G  0 disk
xfer_vg-lvol1 (dm-3)      253:3    0   32G  0 lvm  /xfer
sdc                         8:32   0   24G  0 disk
kdump_vg-kdump_lv (dm-2)  253:2    0   24G  0 lvm
sde                         8:64   0    3G  0 disk

Example 3: We cause the -o flag to filter out only those fields for which we’d like the output to be reported. For example, we could type the following command to report just the NAME, SIZE and MOUNPOINT attributes for the block devices.

[sahil@linuxnix:~] $ lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT
NAME                           SIZE MOUNTPOINT
loop0                          208M
loop1                          456M /mnt/rh
sr0                           1024M
sda                             60G
|-sda1                         512M /boot
`-sda2                        59.5G
  |-os_vg-root_lv (dm-0)        16G /
  |-os_vg-swap_01_lv (dm-1)      4G [SWAP]
  |-os_vg-tmp_lv (dm-4)          2G /tmp
  |-os_vg-var_lv (dm-5)         10G /var
  |-os_vg-hpds_lv (dm-6)         6G /var/opt/perf/datafiles
  `-os_vg-kickstart_lv (dm-7)    4G /kickstart
sdd                              2G
sdb                             32G
`-xfer_vg-lvol1 (dm-3)          32G /xfer
sdc                             24G
`-kdump_vg-kdump_lv (dm-2)      24G
sde                              3G

Example 4: We can use the -n option to omit the printing of header lines and -d option to print top-level devices only.

[sahil@linuxnix:~] $ lsblk -dn
loop0   7:0    0  208M  0 loop
loop1   7:1    0  456M  0 loop /mnt/rh
sr0    11:0    1 1024M  0 rom
sda     8:0    0   60G  0 disk
sdd     8:48   0    2G  0 disk
sdb     8:16   0   32G  0 disk
sdc     8:32   0   24G  0 disk
sde     8:64   0    3G  0 disk

Example 5: Using this can be useful in scripts. I’ll demonstrate this by writing a quick one-liner using awk which will print the total storage of the physical volumes attached to the server.

[sahil@linuxnix:~] $ lsblk -dn -o NAME,TYPE,SIZE | awk '/disk/ {sum+=$NF} END {print sum, "GB"}'

121 GB

I’ll just do a quick breakdown of the awk section.

  • /disk/ is a search term for the word disk. It’ll filter out all disk devices from the input. We can use regular expressions as well.
  • The AWK built-in variable $NF represents the last column in the input (space separated fields) and by using += we iterate over this column and increment the value of the variable sum with the value of $NF in the next row. This continues until the last row is encountered.
  • The END block ensures that what follows is executed only once at the end of the awk statement.
  • Following the END block, we have a print statement which prints the value of sum obtained after adding the value of $NF over all rows in the input.
  • Since we are performing an arithmetic operation on the given field, awk will discard the ‘G’ appended at the end of the SIZE filed in the lsblk output.
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Sahil Suri

He started his career in IT in 2011 as a system administrator. He has since worked with HP-UX, Solaris and Linux operating systems along with exposure to high availability and virtualization solutions. He has a keen interest in shell, Python and Perl scripting and is learning the ropes on AWS cloud, DevOps tools, and methodologies. He enjoys sharing the knowledge he's gained over the years with the rest of the community.