blockdev(8) — Linux manual page

NAME \| SYNOPSIS \| DESCRIPTION \| OPTIONS \| COMMANDS \| AUTHORS \| AVAILABILITY \| COLOPHON

BLOCKDEV(8)               System Administration              BLOCKDEV(8)

NAME top

       blockdev - call block device ioctls from the command line

SYNOPSIS top

       blockdev [-q] [-v] command [command...] device [device...]
       blockdev --report [device...]
       blockdev -h|-V

DESCRIPTION top

       The utility blockdev allows one to call block device ioctls from
       the command line.

OPTIONS top

       -q     Be quiet.

       -v     Be verbose.

       --report
              Print a report for the specified device. It is possible to
              give multiple devices. If none is given, all devices which
              appear in /proc/partitions are shown. Note that the
              partition StartSec is in 512-byte sectors.

       -h, --help
              Display help text and exit.

       -V, --version
              Print version and exit.

COMMANDS top

       It is possible to give multiple devices and multiple commands.

       --flushbufs
              Flush buffers.

       --getalignoff
              Get alignment offset.

       --getbsz
              Print the blocksize in bytes.  This size does not describe
              device topology.  It's the size used internally by the
              kernel and it may be modified (for example) by filesystem
              driver on mount.

       --getdiscardzeroes
              Get discard zeroes support status.

       --getfra
              Get filesystem readahead in 512-byte sectors.

       --getiomin
              Get minimum I/O size.

       --getioopt
              Get optimal I/O size.

       --getmaxsect
              Get max sectors per request

       --getpbsz
              Get physical block (sector) size.

       --getra
              Print readahead (in 512-byte sectors).

       --getro
              Get read-only. Print 1 if the device is read-only, 0
              otherwise.

       --getsize64
              Print device size in bytes.

       --getsize
              Print device size (32-bit!) in sectors. Deprecated in
              favor of the --getsz option.

       --getss
              Print logical sector size in bytes – usually 512.

       --getsz
              Get size in 512-byte sectors.

       --rereadpt
              Reread partition table

       --setbsz bytes
              Set blocksize. Note that the block size is specific to the
              current file descriptor opening the block device, so the
              change of block size only persists for as long as blockdev
              has the device open, and is lost once blockdev exits.

       --setfra sectors
              Set filesystem readahead (same as --setra on 2.6 kernels).

       --setra sectors
              Set readahead (in 512-byte sectors).

       --setro
              Set read-only. The currently active access to the device
              may not be affected by the change. For example, a
              filesystem already mounted in read-write mode will not be
              affected.  The change applies after remount.

       --setrw
              Set read-write.

AUTHORS top

       blockdev was written by Andries E. Brouwer and rewritten by Karel
       Zak.

AVAILABILITY top

       The blockdev command is part of the util-linux package and is
       available from
       https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.

COLOPHON top

       This page is part of the util-linux (a random collection of Linux
       utilities) project.  Information about the project can be found
       at ⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩.  If you
       have a bug report for this manual page, send it to
       util-linux@vger.kernel.org.  This page was obtained from the
       project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩ on
       2020-12-18.  (At that time, the date of the most recent commit
       that was found in the repository was 2020-12-17.)  If you
       discover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page,
       or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for
       the page, or you have corrections or improvements to the
       information in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original
       manual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org

util-linux                     August 2010                   BLOCKDEV(8)

Pages that refer to this page: fdisk(8), mount(8), sfdisk(8), systemd-udevd.service(8)