lsblk on Mac: diskutil list Hides 9 of 20 Devices

On Linux, lsblk prints every block device as a tree: disks, partitions, sizes, mount points. On a Mac:

$ lsblk
zsh: command not found: lsblk
$ brew search lsblk
Error: No formulae or casks found for "lsblk".

The top answer on the Ask Different question about an lsblk equivalent (483,605 views when I checked through the Stack Exchange API today) is diskutil list, which it says "will list all disks with their identifiers, even if unmounted." That answer is from 2013. I ran it on this Mac mini (Apple Silicon, macOS 26.4.1, internal SSD only) and compared it with the plist that the same command can emit. The plain output left out 9 of the 20 devices the system knows about, and one of the hidden ones is mounted.

Homebrew's util-linux does not include lsblk

lsblk is part of util-linux, and Homebrew has a util-linux formula (2.42.4 today). Installing it will not give you lsblk. The formula's caveats list 62 tools that "are not supported for macOS, and are therefore not included." lsblk is on that list, along with findmnt, mount, lscpu, dmesg and fstrim. That makes sense once you read the lsblk man page: it gets its data from sysfs and the udev database. macOS has neither, so there is nothing for a port to read.

On a Mac the data comes from diskutil, and the question becomes which diskutil output you trust.

What diskutil list shows, and what it leaves out

Here is the plain output on this machine:

$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.3 GB   disk0
   1:             Apple_APFS_ISC Container disk2         524.3 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk3         494.4 GB   disk0s2
   3:        Apple_APFS_Recovery Container disk1         5.4 GB     disk0s3

/dev/disk3 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +494.4 GB   disk3
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume Macintosh HD            12.6 GB    disk3s1
   2:              APFS Snapshot com.apple.os.update-... 12.6 GB    disk3s1s1
   3:                APFS Volume Preboot                 9.0 GB     disk3s2
   4:                APFS Volume Recovery                2.5 GB     disk3s3
   5:                APFS Volume Data                    137.1 GB   disk3s5
   6:                APFS Volume VM                      20.5 KB    disk3s6

The partition table names Container disk2 and Container disk1, but neither one gets its own section. The volume numbering also skips from disk3s3 to disk3s5. Add -plist and the gaps fill in. AllDisks has 20 identifiers and WholeDisks has four: disk0 through disk3. The 9 missing ones are:

• disk1, a 5 GB APFS container with volumes named Recovery and Update (disk1s1, disk1s2)
• disk2, a 500 MB container with iSCPreboot, xART, Hardware and Recovery (disk2s1 to disk2s4). Three of those are mounted under /System/Volumes/.
• disk3s4, a volume named Update, mounted at /System/Volumes/Update. df -h lists it. diskutil list does not.

Every one of them has <key>OSInternal</key><true/> in the plist, and on every device that is shown it is false or absent. That flag is the filter. man diskutil doesn't mention it. It says that with no argument, "all whole disks and their partitions are listed," and here two of the four whole disks were not. Asking for a hidden disk by name doesn't help either. diskutil list disk2 printed nothing and exited 0, while diskutil info disk2 answered normally (whole disk, media name APPLE SSD AP0512Z).

For most people this filter is a feature. Those containers hold recovery and boot support volumes, and nobody wants them offered up in an erase menu. It matters when you are trying to account for space on the drive, or when a script assumes that diskutil list and df describe the same set of devices.

The sizes don't mean what lsblk's sizes mean

Even for the devices it does show, the SIZE column mixes two different things. For partitions and whole disks it is the size of the device. For APFS volumes it is the space the volume uses: 12.6 GB for Macintosh HD is its CapacityInUse of 12,557,283,328 bytes. Every volume in the container can use up to the full 494.4 GB, because APFS volumes share their container's free space. An Ask Different question about a confusing diskutil list result comes from exactly this.

The units are decimal, too. diskutil prints 494.4 GB, while df -h prints the same container as 460Gi. lsblk uses powers of 1024 and shortens GiB to G, so a Linux user comparing numbers will see 460.4G for the same partition.

The mount point for / is not a volume either. It is disk3s1s1, a snapshot of the system volume mounted read-only. Apple describes this in its signed system volume documentation. Your files are on disk3s5 (Data) at /System/Volumes/Data, and that is the volume to watch when you are tracking free space, as in purgeable space on a Mac.

The other usual answers

• diskutil apfs list showed container disk3 and 5 of its volumes. It skipped disk1, disk2 and disk3s4, the same OSInternal set.
• system_profiler SPStorageDataType (the second-highest answer on the Ask Different thread) listed 2 volumes, Data and Macintosh HD. It is useful for media type and protocol, not for a device tree.
• df -h or mount list mounted file systems only, 8 /dev/disk* rows here. They include four of the devices diskutil list hides (three disk2 volumes and disk3s4), so they are not a subset of diskutil list. They show nothing that is unmounted, so a drive that won't mount never appears.
• diskutil info -all printed all 20 devices in about 1 second, as long text blocks. diskutil info -plist -all is refused: "You cannot specify both -plist and -all."

A 40-line lsblk for macOS

That refusal message also says what to do instead: take diskutil list -plist and call diskutil info -plist for each device. I wrote that up as a small Python script. It uses only the standard library and runs on the /usr/bin/python3 (3.9.6) that comes with the Command Line Tools:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# lsblk-style tree for macOS, built from diskutil's plist output.
# -a also shows the OS-internal containers that `diskutil list` hides.
import plistlib, subprocess, sys

def diskutil(verb, *args):
    out = subprocess.run(["diskutil", verb, "-plist", *args], capture_output=True, check=True).stdout
    return plistlib.loads(out)

def human(n):
    for unit in "BKMGT":
        if n < 1024 or unit == "T":
            return f"{n}B" if unit == "B" else f"{n:.1f}{unit}"
        n /= 1024

show_all = "-a" in sys.argv
rows = [("NAME", "SIZE", "USED", "TYPE", "LABEL", "MOUNTPOINT")]

def walk(node, depth):
    if node.get("OSInternal") and not show_all:
        return
    dev = node["DeviceIdentifier"]
    info = diskutil("info", dev)          # one call per device: ~0.05-0.12 s each
    used = node.get("CapacityInUse")
    rows.append(("  " * depth + ("└─" if depth else "") + dev,
                 human(info.get("TotalSize") or node.get("Size", 0)),
                 human(used) if used is not None else "",
                 info.get("FilesystemType") or node.get("Content") or "",
                 node.get("VolumeName") or "",
                 node.get("MountPoint") or ""))
    for key in ("Partitions", "APFSVolumes"):
        for child in node.get(key, []):
            walk(child, depth + 1)

for disk in diskutil("list")["AllDisksAndPartitions"]:
    walk(disk, 0)

widths = [max(len(r[i]) for r in rows) for i in range(6)]
for r in rows:
    print("  ".join(c.ljust(w) for c, w in zip(r, widths)).rstrip())

Default output, trimmed:

$ lsblk-mac
NAME           SIZE    USED    TYPE                   LABEL         MOUNTPOINT
disk0          465.9G          GUID_partition_scheme
  └─disk0s1    500.0M          Apple_APFS_ISC
  └─disk0s2    460.4G          Apple_APFS
  └─disk0s3    5.0G            Apple_APFS_Recovery
disk3          460.4G          Apple_APFS_Container
  └─disk3s1    460.4G  11.7G   apfs                   Macintosh HD
  └─disk3s1s1  460.4G  11.7G   apfs                   Macintosh HD  /
  └─disk3s5    460.4G  127.7G  apfs                   Data          /System/Volumes/Data
...

-a prints all 20 rows, with disk1, disk2 and the mounted Update volume added. SIZE is in powers of 1024 like lsblk, and USED is a separate column so the APFS sharing is visible. It took about 0.9 seconds for the 11 default devices and 1.5 seconds for all 20 with -a, almost all of it in the per-device diskutil info calls (0.12 s for one timed call, against 0.02 s for the whole diskutil list). That is fine at a prompt. In a loop, read diskutil list -plist once and skip the info calls.

It is less than lsblk in a few ways. The physical store link (disk0s2 backs disk3) is not drawn as nesting, network shares are not included, and I only had the internal SSD to test with. No external drive was attached, so the removable and USB fields went unexercised. Like ldd on Mac and the tree command on Mac, the hard part isn't the missing binary. It's that the usual replacement answers a narrower question than the Linux command, and doesn't say so.

Sources: every command ran on 2026-10-03 on a Mac mini (Mac16,10, macOS 26.4.1 build 25E253) with only the internal 500 GB SSD attached. The script ran from a throwaway folder under /tmp that has since been deleted. The 20-identifier count comes from the AllDisks array of diskutil list -plist, and the OSInternal flags from the same plist. Timings are wall-clock runs on an idle machine (three runs for the script default, which agreed within 0.01 s). The Homebrew exclusion list is from the util-linux formula's caveats in the formulae.brew.sh API (62 tools). Ask Different view counts and answer text are from the Stack Exchange API on the same day. I did not test external or USB drives, network shares, Intel Macs, or macOS versions before 26.4.1, so I can't say when diskutil started hiding OS-internal containers.