MKFS

 

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 code 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 in a number of directories, like perhaps /sbin, /sbin/fs, /sbin/fs.d, /etc/fs, /etc (the precise list is defined at compile time but at least contains /sbin and /sbin/fs), and finally in the directories listed in the PATH environment variable. 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.