<p>Is there a quick-and-dirty way to tell programmatically, in shell script or in Perl, whether a path is located on a remote filesystem (nfs or the like) or a local one? Or is the only way to do this to parse /etc/fstab and check the filesystem type?</p>

You can use "df -T" to get the filesystem type for the directory, or use the -t option to limit reporting to specific types (like nfs) and if it comes back with "no file systems processed", then it's not one of the ones you're looking for.
```
```
df -T $dir | tail -1 | awk '{print $2;}'
```
```