debian man page for wipefs

WIPEFS(8)						       System Administration							 WIPEFS(8)

NAME
       wipefs - wipe a filesystem signature from a device

SYNOPSIS
       wipefs [-ahnpV] [-o offset] device

DESCRIPTION
       wipefs  can  erase  filesystem  or raid signatures (magic strings) from the specified device to make the filesystem invisible for libblkid.
       wipefs does not erase the filesystem itself nor any other data from the device.	When used without options -a or -o, it lists  all  visible
       filesystems and the offsets of their signatures.

OPTIONS
       -a, --all
	      Erase all available signatures.

       -h, --help
	      Print help and exit.

       -n, --no-act
	      Causes everything to be done except for the write() call.

       -o, --offset offset
	      Specify  the location (in bytes) of the signature which should be erased from the device.  The offset number may include a "0x" pre-
	      fix; then the number will be interpreted as a hex value.	It is possible to specify multiple -o options.

	      The offset argument may be followed by binary (2^N) suffixes KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB, PiB and EiB (the "iB" is optional, e.g. "K" has the
	      same meaning as "KiB") or decimal (10^N) suffixes KB, MB, GB, PB and EB.

       -p, --parsable
	      Print  out  in  parsable instead of printable format.  Encode all potentially unsafe characters of a string to the corresponding hex
	      value prefixed by 'x'.

       -V, --version
	      Output version information and exit.

AUTHOR
       Karel Zak <kzak@redhat.com>.

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

SEE ALSO
       blkid(8) findfs(8)

util-linux							   October 2009 							 WIPEFS(8)