what is UUID naming for devices?

[SteVe Cook]

Ari Sarkar wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I use ubuntu (and recently dual-boot with debian) since April this year.
> I don't use windows anymore, in fact i don't need to. I've learned a lot
> in Linux in these days. 
> Recently I found in ubuntu "/etc/fstab", some UUID for my mounted
> partition rather than "/dev/sda1" etc.
> 
> I found in internet that it has some advantages.
> 
> My question: I have a common partition for data (xfs formatted) which I
> want to access from both ubuntu and debian. And that partition should
> also automatically mount at boot with user can read/write without going
> sudo.
> 
> How can I achieve this using UUID naming at "/etc/fstab"?
> 
> my current disk structure:
> /dev/sda1: reiserfs (ubuntu)
> /dev/sda2: swap (common)
> /dev/sda3: reiserfs (debian)
> /dev/sda4: xfs (common accessible partition)
> 
> right now my fstab has the following line for xfs partition, what should
> I change ?
> /dev/sda4       /media/xfs      xfs     defaults    0  1
> v

Can't really see any great advantage myself, just a lot of fiddling 
around when a new hard disk is added. But

vol_id /dev/sda4

will give you the UUID, then you replace /dev/sda4 with

UUID=(result from vol_id)


SteVe