Find out what filesystems my Linux kernel supports

Posted by Vivek Gite [Last updated: September 29, 2006]

Q. How do I find out what filesystems my Linux kernel supports?

A. Linux supports lost of file system or different file systems. This makes is flexible and well able to coexist with many other operating systems. ext2/ext3 are considered as a native Linux file system.

Nevertheless, Linux supports large number of file system. You need to compile the kernel to get support for other file system.

You can easily find out what filesystem running Linux kernel supports with following command:
$ cat /proc/filesystems
Output:

nodev   sysfs
nodev   rootfs
nodev   bdev
nodev   proc
nodev   sockfs
nodev   futexfs
nodev   tmpfs
nodev   pipefs
nodev   eventpollfs
nodev   devpts
        cramfs
nodev   ramfs
nodev   devfs
nodev   mqueue
        ext3
nodev   usbfs
nodev   usbdevfs
        vfat

Right column indicates filesystem names. Try following command to just print filesystem names:
$ awk '{print $2}' /proc/filesystems | sed '/^$/d'

To get more detailed information about each file system refer to Linux kernel Documentation/filesystems

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