DESCRIPTION
diskutil manipulates the structure of local disks. It provides information about, and allows the administration of, the partitioning schemes, layouts, and formats of disks. This includes hard disks, solid state disks, optical discs, disk images, APFS volumes, CoreStorage volumes, and AppleRAID sets. It generally manipulates whole volumes instead of individual files and directories.
VERBS
Each verb is listed with its description and individual arguments.
list [-plist]
[internal | external] [physical | virtual] [device]
List disks, including internal and external disks, whole disks and partitions, and various kinds of virtual or offline disks.
If no argument is given, then all whole disks and their partitions are listed.
You can limit the number of disks shown by specifying filtering arguments such as internal above, and/or a device disk. When limiting by a disk, you can specify either a whole disk, e.g. disk0, or any of its slices, e.g. disk0s3, but filtering is only done at the whole disk level (disk0s3 is a synonym for disk0 in this case).
If -plist is specified, then a property list will be emitted instead of the normal user-readable output.
A script could interpret the results of diskutil list -plist and use diskutil info -plist as well as diskutil listFilesystems -plist for more detailed information.
The top-to-bottom appearance of all whole disks is sorted in numerical order by unit (whole disk) number. However, within each whole disk’s "sublist" of partitions, the ordering indicates actual on-disk location. The first disk item listed represents the partition which is located most near the beginning of its encompassing whole disk, and so on.
When viewed this way, the slice (partition) parts of the BSD disk identifiers may, in certain circumstances, not appear in numerical order. This is normal and is likely the result of a recent partition map editing operation in which volumes were kept mounted.
Note that both human-readable and plist output are sorted as described above.
See the DEVICES section below for the various forms that the device specification may take for this and all of the other diskutil verbs.
In other words "diskutil list" lists the volume structures on the drive(s) — the same as found in the System Report. It does NOT perform anything remotely resembling a surface scan which can take an hour or more to perform depending on processor speed, I/O speed, and drive capacity. The key number in a surface is NEW bad/remapped data sectors which indicates the magnetic media is beginning to flake off of the drive surface.
