MKFS(8) System Administration MKFS(8)
NAME
mkfs - build a Linux filesystem
SYNOPSIS
mkfs [options] [-t type] [fs-options] device [size]
DESCRIPTION
This mkfs frontend is deprecated in favour of filesystem specific mkfs.<type> utils.
mkfs is used to build a Linux filesystem on a device, usually a hard disk partition. The
device argument is either the device name (e.g., /dev/hda1, /dev/sdb2), or a regular file
that shall contain the filesystem. The size argument is the number of blocks to be used
for the filesystem.
The exit status returned by mkfs is 0 on success and 1 on failure.
In actuality, mkfs is simply a front-end for the various filesystem builders (mkfs.fstype)
available under Linux. The filesystem-specific builder is searched for via your PATH
environment setting only. Please see the filesystem-specific builder manual pages for
further details.
OPTIONS
-t, --type type
Specify the type of filesystem to be built. If not specified, the default filesystem
type (currently ext2) is used.
fs-options
Filesystem-specific options to be passed to the real filesystem builder.
-V, --verbose
Produce verbose output, including all filesystem-specific commands that are executed.
Specifying this option more than once inhibits execution of any filesystem-specific
commands. This is really only useful for testing.
-V, --version
Display version information and exit. (Option -V will display version information only
when it is the only parameter, otherwise it will work as --verbose.)
-h, --help
Display help text and exit.
BUGS
All generic options must precede and not be combined with filesystem-specific options.
Some filesystem-specific programs do not automatically detect the device size and require
the size parameter to be specified.
AUTHORS
David Engel <david AT ods.com>, Fred N. van Kempen <waltje AT uwalt.org>, Ron
Sommeling <sommel AT sci.nl>.
The manual page was shamelessly adapted from Remy Card's version for the ext2 filesystem.
SEE ALSO
fs(5), badblocks(8), fsck(8), mkdosfs(8), mke2fs(8), mkfs.bfs(8), mkfs.ext2(8),
mkfs.ext3(8), mkfs.ext4(8), mkfs.minix(8), mkfs.msdos(8), mkfs.vfat(8), mkfs.xfs(8)
REPORTING BUGS
For bug reports, use the issue tracker at https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/issues.
AVAILABILITY
The mkfs command is part of the util-linux package which can be downloaded from Linux
Kernel Archive <https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>.
util-linux 2.37.2 2021-06-02 MKFS(8)
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