NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | BUGS | AUTHORS | SEE ALSO | AVAILABILITY | COLOPHON |
MKFS(8) System Administration MKFS(8)
mkfs - build a Linux filesystem
mkfs [options] [-t type] [fs-options] device [size]
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.
-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.
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.
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.
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)
The mkfs command is part of the util-linux package and is available from https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.
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)