NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | BUGS | AUTHORS | SEE ALSO | AVAILABILITY | COLOPHON

MKFS(8)                     System Administration                    MKFS(8)

NAME         top

       mkfs - build a Linux filesystem

SYNOPSIS         top

       mkfs [options] [-t type] [fs-options] device [size]

DESCRIPTION         top

       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 via your PATH environment setting
       only.  Please see the filesystem-specific builder manual pages for
       further details.

OPTIONS         top

       -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         top

       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         top

       David Engel (david@ods.com)
       Fred N. van Kempen (waltje@uwalt.nl.mugnet.org)
       Ron Sommeling (sommel@sci.kun.nl)
       The manual page was shamelessly adapted from Remy Card's version for
       the ext2 filesystem.

SEE ALSO         top

       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)

AVAILABILITY         top

       The mkfs command is part of the util-linux package and is available
       from https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the util-linux (a random collection of Linux
       utilities) project.  Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩.  If you have a
       bug report for this manual page, send it to
       util-linux@vger.kernel.org.  This page was obtained from the
       project's upstream Git repository 
       ⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩ on
       2017-07-05.  If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML ver‐
       sion of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date
       source for the page, or you have corrections or improvements to the
       information in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original man‐
       ual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org
util-linux                        June 2011                          MKFS(8)

Pages that refer to this page: filesystems(5)fdformat(8)fdisk(8)fsck(8@@e2fsprogs)fsck(8)fsck.minix(8)mkfs.bfs(8)mkfs.minix(8)mkfs.xfs(8)parted(8)xfs_growfs(8)