mkfs

Build a Linux ext2 filesystem on a partition

$ mkfs [path/to/partition]

Build a filesystem of a specified type

$ mkfs -t [ext4] [path/to/partition]

Build a filesystem of a specified type and check for bad blocks

$ mkfs -c -t [ntfs] [path/to/partition]

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

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 via your PATH environment setting only. Please see the filesystem-specific builder manual pages for further details.

-t,--typetype 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.

-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.

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.

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.

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

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)