mkfs(8) — Linux manual page

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 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.

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
           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.)

BUGS

       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.

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)

REPORTING BUGS

       For bug reports, use the issue tracker at
       https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues.

AVAILABILITY

       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)

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