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macoscocoadisk

How to find the format of a disk volume

I am updating a backup utility I have written and have on the Mac App store.

In a Macintosh Cocoa application, how do I find how a disk volume is formatted? The only official thing I find, is doing a GetResourceValue: for 'NSURLVolumeLocalizedFormatDescriptionKey', but that is language dependent.

My utility does not support volumes formatted for FAT32. My utility needs to do special handling for XSan drives.

Solution

  • statfs(2) will give you a non-localized name:

    struct statfs volinfo;
if(statfs("/path/to/your/volume", &volinfo) != 0)
{
  perror("statfs");
  return -1;
}

fprintf(stderr, "%s\n", volinfo.f_fstypename);

    See /System/Library/Filesystems for the names that will be returned in f_fstypename.