Manual: mkfs

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. 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 status 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.

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.

       -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.

       -h, --help
	   Display help text and exit.

       -V, --version
	   Display version and exit. (Option -V will display version information only when it is the only parameter,
	   otherwise it will work as --verbose.)

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 , Fred N. van Kempen , Ron Sommeling .

       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)

REPORTING BUGS
       For bug reports, use the issue tracker .

AVAILABILITY
       The mkfs command is part of the util-linux package which can be downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive
       .

util-linux 2.41.3					 2025-12-15						     MKFS(8)