NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | BUGS | AUTHORS | SEE ALSO | REPORTING BUGS | AVAILABILITY |
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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 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.
-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. -h, --help Display help text and exit. -V, --version Print version and exit. (Option -V will display version information only when it is the only parameter, otherwise it will work as --verbose.)
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)
For bug reports, use the issue tracker at https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues.
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/>. 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
2024-06-14. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit
that was found in the repository was 2024-06-10.) If you discover
any rendering problems in this HTML version 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 manual page),
send a mail to man-pages@man7.org
util-linux 2.39.594-1e0ad 2023-07-19 MKFS(8)
Pages that refer to this page: crypttab(5), filesystems(5), lvmvdo(7), fdisk(8), fsck(8@@e2fsprogs), fsck(8), fsck.minix(8), mkfs.bfs(8), mkfs.minix(8), parted(8), xfs_growfs(8)