debian man page for mkfs

MKFS(8) 						       System Administration							   MKFS(8)

NAME
       mkfs - build a Linux filesystem

SYNOPSIS
SYNOPSIS
       mkfs [options] [-t type fs-options] device [size]

DESCRIPTION
       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 filesystem type (currently ext2) is used.

       fs-options
	      Filesystem-specific options to be passed to the real filesystem builder.	Although not guaranteed, the following	options  are  sup-
	      ported by most filesystem builders.

       -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.

       -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 and exit.

BUGS
       All  generic  options  must precede and not be combined with filesystem-specific options.  Some filesystem-specific programs do not support
       the -V (verbose) option, nor return meaningful exit codes.  Also, 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), mkfs.xiafs(8)

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

util-linux							     June 2011								   MKFS(8)