Linux programming: which device a file is in

Question

I would like to know which entry under /dev a file is in. For example, if /dev/sdc1 is mounted under /media/disk, and I ask for /media/disk/foo.txt, I would like to get /dev/sdc as response.

Using stat system call on that file I will get its partition major and minor numbers (8 and 33, for sdc1). Now I need to get the "root" device (sdc) or its major/minor from that. Is there any syscall or library function I could use to link a partition to its main device? Or even better, to get that device directly from the file?

brw-rw---- 1 root floppy 8, 32 2011-04-01 20:00 /dev/sdc
brw-rw---- 1 root floppy 8, 33 2011-04-01 20:00 /dev/sdc1

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The quick and dirty version: df $file | awk 'NR == 2 {print $1}'.

Programmatically... well, there's a reason I started with the quick and dirty version. There's no portable way to programmatically get the list of mounted filesystems. (getmntent() gets fstab entries, which is not the same thing.) Moreover, you can't even parse the output of mount(8) reliably; on different Unixes, the mountpoint may be the first or the last item. The most portable way to do this ends up being... parsing df output (And even that is iffy, as you noticed with the partition number.). So you're right back to the quick and dirty shell solution anyway, unless you want to traverse /dev and look for block devices with matching major(st_rdev) (major() being from sys/types.h).

If you restrict this to Linux, you can use /proc/mounts to get the list of mounted filesystems. Other specific Unixes can similarly be optimized: for example, on OS X and I think FreeBSD, you can use sysctl() on the vfs tree to get mountpoints. At worst you can find and use the appropriate header file to decipher whatever the mount table file is (and yes, even that varies: on Solaris it's /etc/mnttab, on many other systems it's /etc/mtab, some systems put it in /var/run instead of /etc, and on many Linuxes it's either nonexistent or a symlink to /proc/mounts). And its format is different on pretty much every Unix-like OS.