MKFS(8) System Administration MKFS(8)
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 via your PATH environment setting only. 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 com-
mands 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, other-
wise 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 automati-
cally detect the device size and require the size parameter to be spec-
ified.
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 filesystem.
SEE ALSO
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
The mkfs command is part of the util-linux package and is available
from https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.
util-linux June 2011 MKFS(8)