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 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  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 filesys‐
              tem 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  exe‐
              cuted.  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, otherwise 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 automatically detect the device size and  require
       the size parameter to be specified.

AUTHORS
       David Engel (david AT ods.com)
       Fred N. van Kempen (waltje AT uwalt.org)
       Ron Sommeling (sommel AT sci.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  ftp://ftp.ker‐
       nel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.



util-linux                                  June 2011                                     MKFS(8)