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Out of curiosity I've decided to call cat on one of my nvme devices with the following command : sudo cat /dev/nvme0n1p1 It started printing out gibberish but now I wonder : what data does this actually represent ? Is it data from somewhere on the disk ?

Telno
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2 Answers2

0

Thats the data that is stored on the device, in this case partition 1.

You can actually clone the device or partitions on the device using the cat command:

 cat /dev/nvme0n1p1 > /dev/sdd1

That command would clone the partition /dev/nvme0n1p1 to partition /dev/sdd1.

dcom-launch
  • 683
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Yes it is the data from all of the partition. You could even use this for e.g. creating an image of the partition. You may test this if you have a smaller partition available, e.g. a EFI-boot partition that often is no more than half a gigabyte.

lsblk
#nvme0n1     259:0    0 476.9G  0 disk 
#├─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0   276M  0 part /boot/efi
#├─nvme0n1p2 259:2    0    70G  0 part /
#├─nvme0n1p3 259:3    0     1G  0 part 
#├─nvme0n1p6 259:4    0 353.9G  0 part /data
#└─nvme0n1p7 259:5    0  11.2G  0 part [SWAP]

cat /dev/nvme0n1p1 > /data/boot.iso
mount /data/boot.iso /mnt
ls /mnt
#EFI   loader  'System Volume Information'
FelixJN
  • 13,566