LinuxGuide.it > Linux Man Page: "mkfs"

 
 
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The Linux Documentation Project maintains an archive of snaphots of the (English language) core Linux manual pages that are maintained by Michael Kerrisk. Corrections and additions are welcome, but review the "Help Wanted" list, first.

Man pages belonging to programs are usually distributed together with those programs. Therefore, the core Linux man-pages mainly contains the pages for system calls and library routines, special devices, and file formats. However, it also contains documentation for a few programs, in cases where the authors or maintainers of the program do not distribute man pages themselves.

This page is part of release 3.11 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages

 
man page(1) manual page Table of Contents

Name

mkfs - build a Linux file system

Synopsis

mkfs [ -V ] [ -t fstype ] [ fs-options ] filesys [ blocks ]

Description

mkfs is used to build a Linux file system on a device, usually a hard disk partition. filesys is either the device name (e.g. /dev/hda1, /dev/sdb2). blocks is the number of blocks to be used for the file system.

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 file system builders (mkfs.fstype) available under Linux. The file system-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 file system-specific builder manual pages for further details.

Options

-V
Produce verbose output, including all file system-specific commands that are executed. Specifying this option more than once inhibits execution of any file system-specific commands. This is really only useful for testing.

-t fstype
Specifies the type of file system to be built. If not specified, the default file system type (currently ext2) is used.

fs-options
File system-specific options to be passed to the real file system builder. Although not guaranteed, the following options are supported by most file system builders.

-c
Check the device for bad blocks before building the file system.

-l filename
Read the bad blocks list from filename

-v
Produce verbose output.

Bugs

All generic options must precede and not be combined with file systemspecific options. Some file system-specific programs do not support the -v (verbose) option, nor return meaningful exit codes. Also, some file system-specific programs do not automatically detect the device size and require the blocks parameter to be specified.

Authors

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 file system.

See Also

fs(5) , badblocks(8) , fsck(8) , mkdosfs(8) , mke2fs(8) , mkfs.bfs(8) , mkfs.ext2(8) , mkfs.ext3(8) , mkfs.minix(8) , mkfs.msdos(8) , mkfs.vfat(8) , mkfs.xfs(8) , mkfs.xiafs(8)

Availability

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

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