This is an awesome tip. Just to note you have to say “disk” in the path /dev/disk because without it, the command will not work. Example ls -l /dev/sda1/by-uuid is incorrect.
There is an update to this post available: UUIDs and Linux: Everything you ever need to know.
The Universally Unique Identifier can be used to identify a device independent form its mount point or device name. This is more and more important as many devices today support hot-plugging or are external anyway. Therefore it makes sometimes sense to access a device (for example in fstab) not by device name but by the UUID.
There are several ways to get the UUID. The first one uses the /dev/ directory. While you are on is you might want to check other by-* directories, I never knew of them.
Another way to get the uuid by usage of the tool blkid:
There you also get the label and other information. Quite usefule.
Btw., if you wonder how “unique” this unique is, here a quote from Wikipedia:
1 trillion UUIDs would…
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