18 Dec 2005 ZFS I am impressed!
When I had initially played around with zfs, I wasn't surprised. Just like you wouldn't be surprised if the next Steven Spielberg movie was a block buster, Jeff Bonwick's file system had to be revolutionary.

What really impressed me (and motivated to blog about it) is this small thing that I thought would not work, but it worked like a charm:
I am setting up various zfs file systems for a variety of purposes, each with different options and properties. I wanted to see a list of all that I just did. zfs list shows a list with default properties like NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT. I wanted to see more and zfs -? gave a long list like:

        type             NO       NO   filesystem | volume | snapshot
        creation         NO       NO   <date>
        used             NO       NO   <size>
        available        NO       NO   <size>
        referenced       NO       NO   <size>
        compressratio    NO       NO   <1.00x or higher if compressed>
        mounted          NO       NO   yes | no | -
        origin           NO       NO   <snapshot>
        quota           YES       NO   <size> | none
        reservation     YES       NO   <size> | none
        volsize         YES       NO   <size>
        .....

You can run

zfs list -o name,available,compressratio

to just list filesystem name, available space and compression. Instead of just copy pasting the properties from the above list, I tried

zfs list -o all

to my greatest surprise it worked! It listed all the properties! I really didn't expect it to be this user friendly (for example ps which doesn't understand ps -o all)

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