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Asked: 2026-05-28T02:15:16+00:00

I am working on a bash script that is designed to tell whether or

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I am working on a bash script that is designed to tell whether or not a given drive is attached to the system, and if it is, to copy some data (backups that need to be taken off-site) to that drive.

What I’d like to do is identify the drive/partition by UUID, so that I can have a script that frequently scans for the presence of that drive, and when it’s plugged in, copies data to it (via rsync, so I don’t particularly care if that part runs more than once, because the later runs are I/O-cheap). I want this to be as simple as possible so that I can hand the drive in question to a non-technical person and say “plug it in here, then unplug it later and take it with you.”

I can’t seem to find any options in mount that quite do this, and grepping through /etc/fstab doesn’t tell me whether a drive is actually mounted or not.

How can I tell, given a UUID, whether or not a drive with that UUID is mounted and what its mount point is?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    /dev/disk/by-uuid/ is a symlink farm for attached volumes. It won’t tell you if the volume is mounted or not but will tell you if it’s plugged in – so might address your particular use case anyway.

    $ ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Nov 22 10:08 b928a862-6b3c-45a8-82fe-8f1db2863be3 -> ../../dm-0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Dec  8 14:33 e37fab85-9b00-4d9b-b25e-0970d6eaa3fa -> ../../sdg1

$ readlink /dev/disk/by-uuid/b928a862-6b3c-45a8-82fe-8f1db2863be3 
../../dm-0

    Does that help?

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