ZFS: List or view filesystems

Contributed by qmchenry June 5, 2006  
Tagged: Solaris system administration

It is worth repeating the distinction between ZFS pools and filesystems. A ZFS filesystem cannot exist outside of a ZFS pool. Creating a ZFS pool also creates a ZFS filesystem of the same name. Understanding the second part can help avoid confusion. This recipe describes the simple step to list the ZFS filesystems configured on the system.

Running the zfs list command will show all ZFS filesystems on the system:

# zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
shiny 75.5K 19.2G 24.5K /shiny
techrx 7.17M 19.2G 25.5K /techrx
techrx/home 102K 19.2G 28.5K /export/home
techrx/home/davak 24.5K 4.98M 24.5K /export/home/davak
techrx/home/qmchenry 24.5K 19.2G 24.5K /export/home/qmchenry
techrx/logs 6.96M 19.2G 6.91M /techrx/logs
techrx/logs/httpd 24.5K 19.2G 24.5K /techrx/logs/httpd
techrx/logs/mail 24.5K 19.2G 24.5K /techrx/logs/mail

The display shows a system configured with two pools: shiny (a mirror, although that cannot be seen from this view) and techrx. The only way to know these are pools is that they are top-level names — techrx is a pool (and its associated filesystem) and techrx/home is a descendent filesystem under techrx.

Also of interest in this output, the filessytem techrx/home is mounted in the Solaris filesystem (the one you cd around in) under /export/home. Descendents of techrx/home are likewise under /export/home (like /export/home/qmchenry). It can be seen from the output that the filesystem techrx/home/davak has a 5M quota while other techrx/home filesystems show the same available disk space as techrx and techrx/home.