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I want the output of:

diskutil list; diskutil info [multiple devices]

Without having to do:

diskutil info disk0; diskutil info disk0s1; diskutil info disk1 ...etc

For example, with many builtin commands like touch rm mkdir, etc. I can use bracket expansion to perform commands on multiple versions of a file:

mkdir njboot0{1,2,3}

Or, when searching, I can use special characters to specify matching specific patterns in a string, like:

find ~/ -type f \( -name *mp3 -or -name *mp4 \)

But:

diskutil info disk{0,0s1,1,1s1}    #syntax error

diskutil info /dev/*               #syntax error

(diskutil info disk$'')$'0|1|2'    #syntax error

diskutil info disk\(0,s0\)         #syntax error

etc...

diskutil info disk${disk}'0'$'s1'  #okay, getting somewhere. this works at least.
  1. How do I perform the diskutil command mentioned above on multiple disks correctly?
  2. Is there any general syntax I can follow for expansion/substitution?

As requested, this is the output of diskutil list:

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            999.7 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
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  • 1
    diskutil seems not to be available for at least my distro. What exactly is the output of diskutil list? Commented Jul 1, 2014 at 2:17
  • It's tagged OSX. Commented Jul 1, 2014 at 2:22
  • @slm Useful tagging. How unexpected... Commented Jul 1, 2014 at 2:24
  • @HaukeLaging - yes, it is a pleasant surprise when it's encountered 8-) Commented Jul 1, 2014 at 2:26
  • @HaukeLaging thanks for reply. sorry, diskutil was a poor choice. second q still applies to bash syntax in general. Commented Jul 1, 2014 at 2:26

2 Answers 2

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2

The brace expansion you're asking about will only expand for files/directories that match on disk to the pattern you use. The other issue you'll run into is diskutil may not be able to handle more than 1 argument at a time. To expand these you'd need to do a while or for loop, and pass the results to diskutil as you iterate through the loop.

Example

$ for i in /dev/*; do diskutil "$i";done

As to your 2nd question there isn't really any method where brace expansion can help you in situations where there are no corresponding files/directories on disk.

Parsing diskutil

Given the output from this command you'll have to resort to using a tool such as awk, sed, or grep to "parse" this output so that you can get meaningful information about the disks, for further queries calling diskutil a 2nd time.

Example

Here's a rough cut of parsing the output from diskutil using grep and sed. There are more efficient ways to do this but this shows you the general approach.

$ diskutil list | grep -E "[ ]+[0-9]+:.*disk[0-9]+" | sed 's/.*\(disk.*\)/\1/'
disk0
disk0s1
disk0s2
disk0s3

With this approach you can then modify the for loop above like so:

$ for i in $(diskutil list | grep -E "[ ]+[0-9]+:.*disk[0-9]+" | \
    sed 's/.*\(disk.*\)/\1/'); do diskutil info $i; done
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If the output of diskutil list is something like disk0 disk0s1 disk1 disk1s1 (separated by space or newline) then you need something like this:

for dev in $(diskutil list); do
  diskutil info "$dev"
done

find

find ~/ -type f \( -name '*mp3' -or -name '*mp4' \)

You must quote the metacharacters which find shall see.

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