Part I. libblkid Overview

The libblkid library is used to identify block devices (disks) as to their content (e.g. filesystem type, partitions) as well as extracting additional information such as filesystem labels/volume names, partitions, unique identifiers/serial numbers, etc. A common use is to allow use of LABEL= and UUID= tags instead of hard-coding specific block device names into configuration files.

The libblkid library was written by Andreas Dilger for the ext2 filesystem utilities, with input from Ted Ts'o. The library was subsequently heavily modified by Ted Ts'o.

The low-level probing code, topology and partitions support was written by Karel Zak. Currently, the library is maintained by Karel Zak.

The library is part of the util-linux package since version 2.15 and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.