mkfs

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)