How to check filesystem of path

There are times when I find it useful to know which filesystem a directory belongs to. For example, I find that Git is very slow in directories that are in NFS mounts. So, I like to disable Git-related actions in my shell when the PWD is in a NFS mount.

An easy way to check the filesystem of a path is:

stat --dereference --file-system --format="%T" /path/to/check

Or the shorter version:

stat -L -f -c "%T" /path/to/check

On a directory in a NFS mount, this returns me nfs. On a locally mounted directory, it returns ext2/ext3. You can use this return value in your shell scripts to control what happens based on the filesystem.

If you find this type of lookup useful, you might want to create a shell alias for it.