How can I tell if a file is on a remote filesystem with Perl?

Question

Is there a quick-and-dirty way to tell programmatically, in shell script or in Perl, whether a path is located on a remote filesystem (nfs or the like) or a local one? Or is the only way to do this to parse /etc/fstab and check the filesystem type?

Answer 1

You can use "df -T" to get the filesystem type for the directory, or use the -t option to limit reporting to specific types (like nfs) and if it comes back with "no file systems processed", then it's not one of the ones you're looking for.

df -T $dir | tail -1 | awk '{print $2;}'

Answer 2

stat -f -c %T <filename> should do what you want. You might also want -l

Answer 3

On some systems, the device number is negative for NFS files. Thus,

print "remote" if (stat($filename))[0] < 0

Answer 4

If you use df on a directory to get info only of the device it resides in, e.g. for the current directory:

df .

Then, you can just parse the output, e.g.

df . | tail -1 | awk '{print $1}'

to get the device name.

Answer 5

I have tested the following on solaris7,8,9 & 10 and it seems to be reliable

/bin/df -g <filename> | tail -2 | head -1 | awk '{print $1}'

Should give you have the fs type rather than trying to match for a "host:path" in your mount point.