delpart

delpart device partition

delpart asks the Linux kernel to forget about the specified partition (by number) on the given block device. It is a thin wrapper around the `BLKPGDELPARTITION` ioctl and updates only the kernel's in-memory view — the on-disk partition table is not touched.Typical use is after manually editing a partition table with fdisk or parted while other partitions on the same disk remain busy: delpart removes the kernel node for a single partition so it can be recreated with addpart, avoiding a full re-read of the table (as partprobe or `blockdev --rereadpt` would attempt).

device

The block device containing the partition (e.g., /dev/sda, /dev/nvme0n1).

The partition number to remove from the kernel's view.

Display help and exit.

Display version information and exit.

Requires root privileges. The partition must not be in use — unmount filesystems and stop any swap, LVM, or RAID components on it first, or the ioctl will fail with EBUSY. Only the kernel's view is updated; on reboot the kernel re-reads the on-disk table, so the partition will reappear unless the table was also edited. Part of the util-linux package.

delpart ships as part of util-linux, which is maintained by Karel Zak and distributed via the Linux Kernel Archive. It complements addpart and resizepart as minimal ioctl wrappers intended for scripts that modify partitions on live systems.

addpart(8), partx(8), partprobe(8), fdisk(8), parted(8)